A Flashback Friday Presentation
Money has done an excellent job of standing off a ways from me without encouragement. I do remember the night ,though, that I won a thousand dollars in poker, much of it in silver dollars and American gold pieces. We were at a private gaming night outside Baltimore. The sack of coins was a pleasant weight to throw into my pack as my friend, and I made a getaway from the private party where we had won the money.
Being creatures of habit ( most of it bad), we began hitching home. I can only plead idiocy. There we were with enough bills in our pockets to have hired a limo to take us back home, and we were traveling on the highway with our thumbs out. Our luck did not hold. After entering the city proper, we found ourselves walking through sections we neither knew nor wanted to be found in. After about an hour, trouble found us in the form of a gang. We were rapidly stripped of what was in our pockets. They had no interest in the pack. The one boy who investigated it almost gagged on the combined odor of dirty clothes and some Garlic Venison sausage (hefty on the garlic). Laughing loudly at the two stupid jerks they had robbed, we were told to run and run fast. We did. We ran most of the way to Monument Square and the little apartment I had above the Buttery Restaurant.
Dumping the backpack’s contents onto the floor, we were both almost overcome by the odor. But sitting there at the bottom of the bag was the sack of coins. We promptly dumped the money onto the floor and counted it out. Just then, my girlfriend came in from work, ” What the f— is that odor?” “Gold and silver,” I replied. ” Well, you better wash it off. That money is dirty and stinks.”
Knowing that my girlfriend was studying Roman history and knew Latin, I decided to be a wag and replied, ” that’s not true – gold has no odor…or as Suetonius says, “Pecunia non olet” money does not stink!
We washed the money. I got to sleep on the couch. And over the next several weeks had some great parties.
What a story!