HIGH FINANCE
A Widow Bit – Feb. 28, 2010
By Mary Koch

            How far can you go on five hundred dollars?

            Not a large sum these days, yet I’ve managed to stretch five hundred bucks perhaps to infinity.

            It began last summer when my friend Mary Lou asked if I’d go along on a road trip from western Washington, to Biloxi, Mississippi. She needed to get a car to Biloxi and wanted someone to share the driving. She offered to pay for the whole trip, but I objected that it was a vacation for me. I insisted on paying my share. After some negotiating, she agreed to let me pay half the hotel and meal costs. She’d buy the gas. To keep the bookkeeping simple, we put everything on Mary Lou’s credit card.

            It was a wonderful trip. We overspent our budget but kept reassuring each other that the high-cost hotels weren’t all that bad when “divided by two.” After we got to Biloxi, Mary Lou dutifully totaled her credit card receipts. My half was five hundred bucks. A heckuva bargain, I thought, as I wrote her a check.

            Months went by. Each time I reconciled my bank statement, the check was still outstanding. Finally I e-mailed a gentle reminder. Maybe, I suggested to Mary Lou, you tucked the check away with your credit card receipts. She e-mailed back: “Mary, I wondered if you ever reconciled your check book. We never had any intention to let you pay for the trip … It was just easier to let you think it was going your way than it was to fight about it.” She knows me all too well.

            It was surely nice, ending the year with an extra five hundred in my checkbook. But before I could correct the total, my hot water heater stopped working. “That’ll be $488.96,” the plumber announced. Easy come, easy go, I thought. Thank you, Mary Lou, for getting me into hot water! Still, I didn’t void the check or correct the total in my checkbook.

            And that’s the way it’s been for several months. Unexpected expenses arise or maybe some little self-indulgence. Instead of despairing over the cost, I reassure myself, Mary Lou’s five hundred will cover it. I’ve even given some of it away a time or two, and still there’s money enough to cover. No matter how depleted the total in my checkbook at the end of the month, I rest easy, mindful of the secret stash.

            With any luck, after I die, the executor of my estate will do a final reconciliation and discover there’s still one outstanding check, in the amount of five hundred dollars. 

            Of course, it’s not about the money. Bank statements and financial assets are make-believe numbers, anyway. There’s no way that anyone’s true net worth can be enumerated on a spread sheet. It’s about an on-going, deep well of friendship. It’s about the fact that all of has have caches of individual wealth – wealth that is unique to each, even if we rarely draw upon them.