The Bank

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

The Bank

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Robert Frost

The kindergarten teacher who taught most of my eight kids once told me that she could always tell when my children were in her class. They understood the value of money. I guess she was right. I remember pulling pennies out of the footies of Son #6’s sleepers as soon as he learned to crawl. I never figured out how he got them in there, and now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

By the time he was two years old, Son #6 was routinely dropping change and other random objects (think car keys, socks, his sister’s piggy tail holders, and anything else low enough for him to reach) into every available hole. Once, when one of his brothers slammed the front door open so hard the doorknob knocked an opening in the drywall, I caught Son #6 trying to ram a sippy cup into the crevice before his dad got it patched. (I always imagined some future archaeologist digging around in the ruins of our neighborhood and finding Son #6’s assorted treasures. “Hey fellows,” he’d yell to his buddies. “Look at these strange artifacts at the bottom of what must have been stairs. I’m thinking it’s some sort of religious offering, ya know?”) So much for accurate historical conclusions.

But the coup de grace came the day two of my older sons were scuffling over a soccer ball in the living room. Attempting to keep the ball out of his brother’s reach, Son #2 pitched it at the opposite wall. Truth is, he would have made a lousy goalie because the ball crashed into the picture window over the sofa instead. Glass spewed everywhere, but oddly enough, only the single inner pane shattered. The outer pane remained intact, leaving a 6- or 8- inch in diameter hole between the two sheets of glass.

You guessed it. Son #6 wasted no time in finding his dad’s accumulated change on the end table next to our bed. I didn’t see him drop the coins into the hole that first time, but upon investigation, I didn’t see any bloody fingers either. I guess when it came to money, Son #6 took extra care.

The other kids thought the ½ dozen coins in the window between the two panes were hilarious. To add to the pile, they ravaged the crevices of the couch, the pockets of winter coats in the hall closet, even a few quarters I stashed in a jar by the kitchen sink. Why didn’t my husband or I tape over the hole immediately? Good question. Our plan was to replace the glass in the next day or two. But some other disaster required the money set aside for the repair, and to be frank, we just got distracted with other things.

So, Son #6 kept adding to the horde. His little fingers found pennies under the beds or trapped in corners, places the rest of us weren’t close enough to the ground to see. In a few days, there was enough change in that window that our neighbors started staring as they walked by the house. I joked to one of them that it was Son #6’s mission fund. That unleashed a deluge of coins from the pockets of every adult who came through the door. The pile grew into a pyramid more than a foot high and two and a half feet wide.

By the time we finally got the window fixed (and yes, the guy who came to repair it added a $1 or $2 of change out of his own pocket), Son #6 had stockpiled more than $37. 00. After the window was replaced, all that change went straight to the bank. Seventeen years later, it helped purchase a couple of suits for his mission in Chihuahua, Mexico. I’m pretty sure there’s not another missionary in the world who can say that. But then, none of them learned the value of money at such an early age.