rolling coins

It started innocently one day when I was broke, and I pulled out the penny jar that had been gathering change for years. It started innocently one day when I was broke, and I pulled out the penny jar that had been gathering change for years. It took about four hours to line up every quarter and penny and nickel and dime in satisfyingly high towers. I went to a local bank and asked the teller if they accepted change and she rolled her eyes, gave me a bunch of coin wraps and instructed me to write my account number on the side of every wrapped bundle -- $10 in quarters, $5 in dimes, $2 in nickels and 50 cents in pennies. I dutifully rolled up all the change over the course of a couple more hours and at the end of it had amassed the small unknown fortune of $82.50. Lunch, cigarettes loomed on the horizon. Is there anything better than free money? Yes, the illusion that you have made money out of nothing. Years later, it's still a habit I can't break. I might make a good enough living but I still find myself hoarding change (instead of throwing it in those ever ubiquitous "tip" jars) and in a lull time rolling them up, setting them aside, and on a broke feeling day having something to show for myself. At the end of a day out and about my pockets are fairly bulging with change, and my daily purchases reflect my obsession -- the double tall latte at Starbucks because it costs $4.06 -- 94 cents in coin!, the newspaper back when it was a quarter, the perfectly priced packs of gum -- hell, I'll buy anything if it's priced a penny over the dollar. The bank teller still rolls her eyes -- occasionally they challenge my count and go through them penny by penny, but I always come up right. After all, for them it's just a job, but for me, it's a vocation. And some days, it's the only income in the world.