"Please, I’m begging you.”

When he saw the phone bill, he grabbed his cell phone and smashed it on the floor.

We have 3 cell phones on our plan, one for Sean, one for me, and one for Mandy, our teenaged daughter. We have a certain amount of minutes to share, and a certain amount of money that we feel is enough to throw towards cell phone usage. And that’s it.

When we received last month’s bill it was abnormally high, partly because we had exceeded our minutes, and partly because I had been making calls to Mandy while Sean and I were vacationing in Jamaica. So Sean gave Mandy a warning that she needs to limit her usage before nine o’clock during the week. Nights and weekends are free, and we only really need it for emergencies anyway. “When you’re at home, just use the house phone,” he told her.

It was the first time we had ever gone over.

So when the phone bill arrived this month, and it was $330 more than it should have been (bringing us up to a whopping $417), my dear husband became a raging bull. And his cell phone suffered the brutal consequences.

Sean wanted to withhold Mandy’s birthday presents next month to repay the overage. I said I’d rather have her work off the excess phone charges. Not giving her any presents just makes a sad birthday and doesn’t necessarily teach her anything. Doing chores around the house might give her a better understanding of just how long it takes to earn the kind of money that she wasted chatting on the phone with her boyfriend. $330 worth of vacuuming, mopping, dusting, and scrubbing the bathrooms is a lot of work. In another week or two there will be yard work to do as well. It will probably take her until the summer to repay the money, even at the very generous rate of $10 per hour. Sean agreed.

********

The next day Sean went to Best Buy to plead his case. He showed the guy behind the counter his mangled mess of a phone and explained that he needed a new one.

“Did you… drop it?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“When I saw the phone bill, I grabbed my cell phone and smashed it on the floor.”

“Well who used up all the minutes?”

“My teenaged daughter.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Listen, you have to help me out here, man. From January until now, I’ll be spending about a thousand dollars on the cell phone bill. I just can’t justify another fifty bucks to replace my phone. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Alright, let me see what I can do.”

So he went into the back and came out with a new phone.

“Here you go. I’m just going to tell them that it wasn’t working properly and needed to be replaced. I feel for ya man. Good luck.”

Once again, honesty is the best policy.




"You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance."

– Franklin P. Jones

The Winning Numbers

When my grandfather was alive, I would visit him every Sunday and Wednesday.

Mandy was just a little thing, but she enjoyed our visits too. Pop was fun. He played songs for her on his keyboard, and he let her play it too. And he was very animated as he told her funny stories.

He always put Jeopardy on at seven o’clock. He loved to hear me answering the questions, especially the “final Jeopardy.”

“You should go on that show,” he would say. “You could make a lot of money.”

Pop knew I had no money. I was a single mother from the day my daughter was born. I didn’t have a dime to my name before she was born, since I was working three jobs to pay my way through college. After she was born I had even less. He was always trying to give me money.

“Here, take this twenty.”

“No, Pop. You don’t have to do that.”

“Take it for you and the baby. Just take it. I’m sure there’s something you need.”

I would make him lunch and dinner while we were there, too. He loved when I cooked for him.

“Why does toasted cheese always taste better when you make it?” he would ask.

“Because it’s nice to be taken care of sometimes,” I would tell him.

Pop was blind for the last 15 years of his life. He still took care of himself just fine, though, and people who met him didn’t even realize that he couldn’t see. And he would always figure out ways to do tasks that seemed beyond the capability of a blind 75 year old man, like taking out his air conditioner or grouting a loose tile in the bathroom.

But there were some things he just couldn’t do alone, like going to the store. And since he couldn’t go to the store, he couldn’t “play the numbers.” So every Sunday and Wednesday he would give me some money (yes he was blind, but he always knew which bill in his pocket was the $5 and which was the $20) and I would play the “Pick 3” for him. I always left his house with little scraps of paper in my pocket with his numbers written down: 616, 327, 684…

He won fairly often, too.

Sometimes the numbers were birthdays or other important dates. Sometimes he was trying to use a system, and he would pick his numbers based on the number from the day before.

“Put in 817 for me. See yesterday was 726, so I’m gonna go one up on the 7, one down on the 2, and one up on the 6. We should do alright, as long as it’s not Yolanda Vega.”

Yolanda Vega was one of the women who announced the numbers on TV. Pop never liked her. “She picks terrible numbers,” he would say.

Well one day Pop called me, all excited. “Did you hit too?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“The numbers. I was wondering if you hit too, since we played your birthday, 427.”

“Oh, are you kiddin’? I didn’t play it.”

“You didn’t play it?”

“Nah, I don’t usually play. I usually just put yours in.”

Truth was, I had forgotten to put his numbers in. We had stayed with Pop later than usual the night before. Mandy was getting cranky, and I had just gone straight home and put her to bed.

“Which store did you get them from?”

“Baisley’s.” I lied. I lied to my grandfather. But how could I tell him that I didn’t put the numbers in? What else did my grandfather have to look forward to, besides my visits and playing the numbers?

“You’ll have to go back and see how much we won.”

So I drove to the bank to see how much money I had. $367.42. I wasn’t sure which bills had gone through and which were still pending, but it didn’t matter. I took out $350 and went to see my grandfather.

“Here it is, Pop. You hit for $350.”

“Yeah? $350?”

I called out each denomination as I handed him the bills, so he knew what they were. “Here’s a fifty, and another fifty, and a twenty…” He was grinning from ear to ear.

“So you didn’t play your birthday, huh?”

“Nope. Too bad… we could’ve both hit. That would have been fun.”

After I handed him all the money, he gave me a hundred back.

“Keep this for you and Amanda,” he said.

“No, Pop. You don’t have to do that. These are your winnings.”

“Well it was your birthday that hit. Here, take it. I’m sure there’s something you need. Go buy something for you and my great-granddaughter.”

“How about if I take the three of us out to lunch?”

I can’t remember if I bounced any checks that month. I probably did, but I really don’t remember. The only thing I do remember, now that 10 years have passed and my grandfather is gone, is that I made him happy that day. And that’s all that matters.

The Man at the Shortline Bus Terminal

The silence and emptiness were unbearable. It was my first semester at school, and I was scheduled for one of the last final exams of the year, just 3 days before Christmas. My roommates, and most of the students in my dorm, had left over a week ago.

I was out of money except for half a roll of laundry quarters, so I spent 8 miserable days living on 50-cent vending machine brownies because they were the cheapest things I could buy. I was so incredibly lonely and homesick, with nothing to do but study Calculus and eat brownies in eerily quiet solitary confinement.

After I had finally taken my test, I dashed across campus to my room and franticly crammed everything into my duffle - Champion sweatshirts and jeans and boots – with the urgency of a fleeing criminal. I phoned the cab that would transport me from hell to the bus station. I couldn’t wait to be home.

But luck was not on my side… the cab was late, I missed the bus, and I had to wait for 3 ½ hours in the terminal for the next one.

The place was deserted - the entire town was deserted. And I was on the verge of tears, stranded in a vast sea of empty chairs.

I noticed him from across the rows of fallow seats and I was sure that he was headed straight for me - this old man, plodding slowly but deliberately in my direction. Why were people always so drawn to me? Why did old men and little girls and everyone in between always seek out my company and compassionate ear? It has happened all my life. I think sometimes my openness is a yellow banner, waving merrily for all to see.

But there’s no welcome mat laid out before me now, I thought, with my narrowed eyes and my miserable grimace.

And here he was, on his way to disturb my angry little cocoon. Oh, I was in a wretched mood. He had the nerve to ask me if anyone was sitting here, motioning to where my heavy duffle was perched beside me. The place was barren. There were hundreds of seats to choose from. But I got up and dragged my bag to the floor and slumped back down, not saying a word.

The old man, with his scraggly beard and dirty clothes, smelling like coffee and cigarettes, was undeterred. He sat down and started to talk to me.

With a toothless smile he told me about his 88th birthday, 10 months prior, when he decided that he hadn't seen enough of the country and yearned to do so before he died. So he sold his things, boarded a Shortline bus in his hometown of Phoenix, and started out on what would probably be the last great adventure of his life.

He was on his way to New York City, a place he had heard so much about but had never seen. He had run out of money a few states back, so he worked odd jobs to make the money to get to the next place on his list. Boyish excitement dancing in his old gray eyes, he told me stories of the places he had seen. I just had to know what kind of odd jobs an 88 year old would be hired for. I listened for hours.

We talked the whole three hours in the terminal, and we sat together on the bus and talked for two and a half more until I reached my stop. I wished I had some money to give him, but I did have a few spare 50-cent brownies from the vending machine. And he was so grateful to have them.