Ten Cents

I was walking up to the mailbox yesterday and saw a dime on the sidewalk. Do I even bother bending over to pick it up? Well, I did, but it got me to thinking about how little a dime is these days and I don't think there is anything that you can buy with a dime anymore. Even phone calls and gumball machines don't take anything less than a quarter. But, I picked it up and put it in my pocket because if I found a dime every day of the year it would add up to $36.50 and you could buy something with that.

It brought back a memory of when we were kids in the mid sixties and were on vacation on our boat and had traveled down the Chesapeake Bay to the inland waterways of the east coast. I think we were somewhere in North Carolina and we were at a boatyard and a man gave the youngest one of us, Heather, a quarter. A whole quarter! We were all so amazed that someone had given her a whole quarter! She was rich!

Nowadays if someone approached your child wanting to give them money you'd be calling 911 and sending the SWAT team out because only a pedophile would give a kid a quarter, right? Not back in the innocent 60's, though, a man giving a kid a quarter was just a nice man who liked kids.

I'm assuming this picture is the boat that we had since it's in with a bunch of family pictures that are on my computer.


We crammed all seven of us on that boat, I don't know how my parents kept their sanity with five kids in such a small space. I think that's why they made us wear life jackets all the time, just in case they got fed up and 'accidentally' pushed a few of us overboard.


I'm not sure if this is the boatyard where Heather got the quarter from the pedophile, I mean nice man, but from the big grin on her face and the rather sour look on mine, it just might be.

See, she's got her life jacket. Just in case.