I’ve never appreciated nor ever really trusted in the ideal of placing undue importance on money… Until I became the hypocrite. Let me start with some flashbacks. I suppose it has to do with genetics. On my father’s side, I come from poor Irish and German Catholic immigrants… Okay, well, someone was at least poor at one time. There is some truth to the stereotype that Irish people especially, can smell BS a mile away, pardon my turn of a phrase. But after the tragic history of Catholics in Ireland and all they suffered under the iron grip of rich Protestant landlords during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it’s no wonder that there is some inborn sense of suspicion and discernment. Enter: me.

Like father, like son, as the cliché goes. My dad saves everything, and by that, I mean everything. When he and my step-mom moved just recently to Philadelphia, there were boxes and boxes of mail and papers buried in the garage. Some of the mail dated back as far as 1998! I learned this “packratism” from my father, and although my step-mom has begun to break my dad of this habit, it will be a while longer before my wife will completely break me. I’m not sure how it started per se. What does this have to do with suspicion of trust in money? Well, I’ll lead you there, trust me.

Even as I write this, there are piles of junk mail (and perhaps some bills) stacked in cluttered columns around my house. Perhaps it started with the fact that my family moved so much growing up, and that not only did I lose many friends, but I lost many things. Important things like Nerf guns and pieces of Lego sets that I worked so hard on. I hated it the most when I would lose GI Joes… Just thinking of it saddens me.

There was one time when I lived in a little house in Santa Rosa, California, not far from San Francisco, and I brought home a brand new toy gun. To this day, I don’t remember what it fired. Did it fire caps? Did it fire darts? I don’t recall. I was only seven or eight, but relatives can vouch for how particular I was about keeping my things in good shape. Some friends were over in my backyard, and I set my new gun up on top of the wooden fence that separated my backyard from the neighbors’ behind us. My first mistake. No, it didn’t fall into the neighbors’ yard; that would’ve been an easy problem to fix. I should explain that this fence was actually two fences built back to back, and the ivy had grown thick up around them from underneath a large wooden porch. It was as though all the pieces, the porch, the fences, and the ivy and underbrush from beneath, had become one entity. Anything that fell beneath the porch was lost forever, like the gaping jaws of oblivion. Likewise, anything that fell into the crack between the two fences was also lost… forever.