Daddy's Fish BowlA Clear View Of A Father's Family Experiences

A Quarter Can Change The World

Allow me to take you back, back in time to a place when things were much much simpler.  Close your eyes for a moment and imagine…wait a minute, if you close your eyes, how can you read this post? Okay scratch that, keep your eyes open and imagine your oh so wonderful childhood, when you had not a care in the world.  Ah the good ole days right, a bag of chips cost 25 cents, summer actually meant 2 entire months of freedom.  Yeah, life was a lot easier back then and as much as we’d like to stay young forever, it’s not very feasible.  However, when there are kids around, you can be forever young, reliving your special memories through them.  That’s what happened to me the other day, Tre made a comment that showed my exactly how simplistic his world view is and it’s been the highlight of my week, possibly the whole month.

A few days ago, I get a call from Fefe while I’m at work. It was a short call, straight to the point: “You better bring home a quarter, gotta go”.  Just read that sentence for a moment; now imagine how baffled I was on the other end of the line listening to it.  I’ve recently introduced Fefe to the joys of one of my favorite television shows, “The Wire” so I thought this was some half-ass joke. Maybe she was pretending our phones were tapped and she was talking in code to set up a drug deal?  Whatever the case, I spent way more time than I should have trying to determine what was going on.  Completely stumped, I pushed it out of my mind and carried on.  Until I got a text while on my way home: “You get the quarter?” Okay, enough is enough, somebody’s gonna explain to me what’s going on here!

So I called her and demanded that she explain all of this quarter talk that she had been rambling about throughout the day. She gladly obliged and told me about a conversation that she had with Tre earlier in the day.

Tre: “Mommy, Daddy at work?”

Fefe: “Yes baby, Daddy’s at work”

Tre: “Daddy went to work to get quarters”

Fefe: “huh?”

Tre: “Daddy went to work to get green quarters for me, that’s why Daddy at work”

Fefe:  “Yes baby, you’re right.  That’s exactly why Daddy’s at work”

If you don’t speak toddler, that gibberish may not make a lot of sense to you, what Tre was trying to say is that Daddy goes to work to get quarters so that he can buy green gumballs.  How green gumballs became green quarters, I have no clue.  Quite frankly, I’m a little disturbed by the fact that I’m actually able to translate such things.  Maybe Tre has been watching “The Wire” and has learned to speak in code better than we have. 

I’m not sure how this kid already knows to associate me going to work with money, but somehow he has learned a basic understanding of the way the world works.  However flawed his understanding may be, the concept has been instilled in him.  The more I thought about it, the more it made me smile.  At two years old, the little guy has learned that his Daddy must leave him every day for several hours and go to “work” to bring home quarters to buy gumballs with.  It’s still taking a little bit of time to get use to the fact that my son is willing to pimp me out for 8-10hrs a day to receive a lousy quarter.  But you see, that’s really the beauty of it all.  At his age, a quarter is all he needs to satisfy his wants and the fact that Daddy has to work all day to get that quarter is acceptable because it’s what’s important to him at this point in time.  As he grows older, what’s important will change and become more complicated; with that change comes stress, worries, and disappointments.  So I hope he holds onto this simplistic outlook on life for as long as he can.  As long as he does, I’ll be happy to slave the day away for quarters to make my little guy happy.

I’ve learned something from this encounter with Tre.  When the weight of the world is on your shoulders, and things are becoming too much to handle, just think back to when times were a lot simpler, when your biggest worry was getting a quarter for the gumball machine.  Something that seems so trivial now, was actually very important to you way back then, and you somehow found a way to carry on, whether you got that quarter or not.  So while your current troubles may seem enormous to you now, in the future you may look back on them as being nothing more than a quarter in the gumball machine.