$ MONEY $

In adulthood, and even earlier, I had little regard for money as a driving force of what I worked at. I needed money as does everyone in a money society. But I worked more from interest in what I was doing than for monetary remuneration. And early on I realized that the worth of a person, the value of a person, had nothing at all to do with the amount of money they had.

What does money mean to you? What can money do for you? What does lack of money mean to you and do to you? How do you feel about people with limitless amounts of money? Should all people have “enough” money? How much is “enough” money? How do you feel about strangers asking you for money? How do you feel about people you know asking you for money? How do you feel about giving money and how do you feel about lending money? Is there a connection between good people and money or bad people and money that changes the nature of the money? Do religion and charity necessarily have a money connection? How do you feel about good people without money? How do you feel about bad people without money? Now put the shoe on the other foot. How do you feel about good people with money and bad people with money? Do you think a lot about money? A recent article in Scientific American discussed a finding that people who think about money are less likely to help others – in any kind of situation. How about that!

I suppose I could fill pages with questions about money. I suppose I could fill even more pages with answers to questions about money. Now I’ll tell you about how I feel about money and what I think about money. The two are very different for most people, I believe. People seem to be able to tell you more what they think about money than what they feel about money. Is that understandable, or what? I suppose telling what one thinks about money is less revealing than talking about what one feels about money. No? Let’s see what I can dredge up from my mind about my thoughts and feelings about money.

I’ll spend some time on my early memories about money. I remember finding a penny in the street when I was about five years old. I was walking with my mother and became very excited at seeing this treasure lying in the Bronx gutter as we walked along. I picked it up and showed it to her and she smiled and told me I was now very wealthy. I felt very wealthy. I didn’t know we were money-poor, that there was a “depression” in the land in 1932. Even before that moment, I remember before I was five – probably four – and we were living in New Jersey. My mother bundled up my brother Chaim and my sister Helen and me and she gave them a nickel with instructions to go down to the corner candy-store and buy me a birthday present. I remember clearly that it was a nickel, and I remember thinking that it was a huge amount of money. Indeed, perhaps in those days it was a huge amount of money to spend on such a non-essential as a birthday present for a four-year-old. They picked out and bought a lead dirigible painted blue and gave it to me. I was a very happy child to have received such a munificent gift. I do not know or remember if Chaim and Helen were jealous of me or if Mom had given them money to buy something for themselves. The money and the gift made me feel very good. Is that what money is supposed to do? Make one feel very good? I suppose so.

The money fountain of my mother never dried up. Somehow, she always had just enough to handle the requirements of keeping her children from ever feeling “poor.” In addition, Chaim and I became early workers for money. He became a delivery-boy in a butcher shop when we moved to Rochambeau Avenue after several years of selling newspapers on his small route of neighbors and friends when we lived on Southern Boulevard. I was his employee in those first ventures. Then I took off on my own to become a shoe-shine boy with my friend Henry Hoffman. And in between, we poked our greased sticks down the subway grates when we spied a coin down in the darkness there – usually pennies or nickels. On rare occasions I’d pull up a quarter. What a candy binge we’d have then! Abie in the candy store would ask us seriously if we had stolen the money from our mother’s pocket-book. “No way!” We easily convinced him of our moral rectitude – especially with the grease from our sticks still covering the coins as evidence of our honesty. But Abie’s idea was a good one. I began stealing from my father’s pockets with regularity – when he was home on the Sabbath. These were formative years for my developing sense of money. I went on to develop all sorts of scams and even engaged in outright thievery of valuable objects from my Aunt Fay’s apartment down the block from where we lived. Fay is long dead but the mystery of the disappeared gold necklace remains a secret buried to this day in my blackened brain. I stole it by taking the key to her apartment from its hiding place in our apartment and ransacking her jewelry drawer. When I went to cash it in for money at a local jewelry store, the jeweler informed me in stentorian tones that I must get a letter from my mother or father before he could give me the enormous sum of ten dollars for the necklace. I left and returned the next day with letter in hand, written as neatly as a nine-year-old could write giving me permission to sell the piece, and signed with a flourish with my mother’s name, “Mom.” The jeweler weighed the chances that he would be caught but the temptation of getting a piece of jewelry worth a couple of hundred dollars for a mere ten dollars increased his belief that my mother was simply a near illiterate who desperately needed money and was too ashamed to come into his store herself. I’m sure that is the story he formulated in his mind to be prepared were he ever to be questioned by the police. I convinced my mother I had made enough money shining shoes to purchase the Gilbert chemistry set I brought home, having bought it with my ill-gotten gains. I was learning all about money.

I learned even more when I was taught to play dice with a couple of big guys who made me feel as big as they were by their compliments over my prowess at earning money by shining shoes. They were completely awestruck by the fortune I showed them I had earned that particular Sunday morning. I had about seventy-five cents. Well, if I was smart enough to earn that money, obviously I was smart enough to learn how to roll the dice and increase my stash by the amounts each of them had in hand – about thirty or forty cents each. And so we took our turns rolling the dice until – you guessed it, maybe. I wiped them out. It was then that I learned a very important lesson about money that I have carried with me through my life. They convinced me that we had been playing for fun. Not only that. They convinced me that I had to pay them for teaching me how to play. How did they do that, you may ask? They did it by standing up very tall next to me with their fists clenched and looks of fearsome determination on their faces and in their eyes, and visceral sounds of increasing anger in their voices. I willingly returned their money and willingly turned over to them my shoeshine earnings for that day.

The lesson I learned is that money and power go together.

I earned my first money, $2.00, from my literary endeavors when I was about eight by submitting this amazingly witty pun to a New York Daily News contest of those years; “The player was shackled on the forty yard line.” I must have been poisoned by that success.