Bickering

Here’s an incomplete list of the things we bicker about: the fact that I rarely have any cash in my wallet; my habit of watching TV standing up; my repeated failure to re-supply paper towels, toilet paper, and paper napkins.

I’m guilty of the first two, no argument, but I reject the third accusation outright.

The money thing is a serious peeve of my wife’s, and I honestly can’t explain why I walk around most days with only a buck or two in my wallet. Day-to-day I don’t spend that much cash. I’m home to work, work back to home, and since I usually go home for lunch, I just don’t need cash.

Of course, when we find ourselves in line at a restaurant or the movies and my wife turns to me to ask if I have any cash, and I open my wallet and extract the single worn dollar that I’ve carried around for two weeks, she inevitably accuses me of being a loser, less than a man, and worse.

My father carried a money clip, paid cash for everything. Had my father left his house with less than a hundred dollars in his pocket he would have felt naked. He once advised me to never carry money in my wallet. Because he stored his wallet beneath the front seat of his car instead of carrying it in his hip pocket, he owned the same wallet for a couple of decades. When he died and my brother and I were sorting through his things, we found that his wallet contained his Army discharge card, a photograph of our mother, some scraps of paper on which phone numbers were scribbled, not much else. By that time, my father was living a hand-to-mouth existence; his money clip held more ones than tens and twenties.

That was a different age, the age of smoky cocktail parties and late night pinochle games, the age before ATM machines and debit cards and the Internet. Whether it was a better age than ours I couldn’t say. From this distance it seems less complicated, but that doesn’t imply that it was better.

My wife is probably right when she claims that a man my age needs to carry cash in his wallet. I’m sure my father would agree with the cash part, not the wallet.