What's In Your Wallet?

Feeling particularly inspired, and trying to follow a pseudo-resolution for the new year to stay ahead of the curve, my wife began to file and organize the paperwork in advance of arriving T4 forms and such.  The goal is to be ready to file income taxes early, in order to receive a quicker pay out.  Assuming of course that we’ll get money back.  I won’t pretend to understand how taxes work.  Numbers confuse me in the best of times, so sifting through forms, and then accurately transposing the right numbers in the right places would be a perennial nightmare for me.  It is for many; that’s why H&R Block exists.  However, I have been fortunate to have a spouse who is quite good at this sort of thing, let alone one who understands the whole process.  That has included filing business tax paperwork for our rental apartments, her scrapbooking businesses of years past, student loans, and anything to do with our children.  A buddy of mine, who was my roommate at one time, tried in vain for days to file his own taxes.  He was so overwhelmed by the process that he began to forget simple multiplication facts.  I laughed at him, a lot.  In hindsight, I applaud him for at least giving it a try, and can’t help but remember his fumbling for basic facts every time I flub a math question on the chalk board.  It happens to the best of us, and always at the worst of times.

My wife has a very reliable system for filing paperwork, so the best I can do is be an assistant of sorts while she’s figuring out what to put in what file, which years we can safely shred, and in what order they’ll appear in the filing cabinet.  It’s easy enough to do, as long as you give yourself enough time, and you don’t wait until everything is one big jumbled mess.  Her proactive instincts paid off, because over the course of the afternoon, we played some music and sifted through some great memories as we pitched old papers, some yellowing from age, some with logos of companies that are actually defunct (such as Wacky Wheatley’s, and NB Tel before it was absorbed by Aliant).  Some of the things we found as we picked through layers of receipts and statements went into a separate pile.  These were things that we didn’t need to keep out of necessity, but things that brought back great memories.  There were certificates and letters of correspondence from when we lived down south, various forms and letters about our first house, which we bought in September of ’02 (including pictures and the original inspection report, which may yet be important).  There wasn’t much in this pile when we were finished, but we decided to dedicate one file in the cabinet to keep the miscellaneous things, the papers worth more in memories than in anything financial.

I then decided, by this time inspired myself, to take on the less tedious task of cleaning out my wallet.  Most of you would think that this is a minor chore; I mean, really, how much can you fit in a wallet anyway?  It’s not like I carry a purse.  It’s a good thing I don’t.  You would be amazed to see what I had stored in a small fake-leather billfold that measures about ten square centimeters.  I know I was.

 Another friend, who is always brutally honest with me when dispensing advice or remarking on some odd quality about me, once said: “You keep way too much in your wallet!  You can’t possibly need all the stuff you keep in there!  Just leave all that in your glove compartment, then bring in only what you need when you actually need it!”  His idea makes sense, to some degree.  Yes, I would love to lighten the load, and yes, I only use certain things in specific instances.  So, I decided to empty the contents, spread them out, and make two piles.  One for the cards I absolutely have to keep in my wallet, and the other for cards I can safely keep in the dash.  I ended up with three piles.

The following is a break-down of what I culled from the various little pockets in my wallet and deemed to be of the utmost importance, and would remain on my person at all times:

Ø   Driver’s License:  This one was a no-brainer.  My wallet has a small card-holder with a transparent window, and my driver’s license was naturally kept there.  The few times in the last few years I’ve ever had to bring it out, I’ve only had to show the leather insert with my license exposed; I can’t recall ever having to remove it from the actual window.  Today I did, and the plastic card with my dead glare looks like its decades old, even though it only expires in 2014.  It appears that the transparent window is yellowed and scratched on the inside and out, and the card, from so many months in the right rear pocket of my pants, has been sat on so often it’s scuffed and scraped almost to the point that it’s barely legible.  Luckily there’s a digital code thingy on it, so if I ever needed to be identified and they couldn’t tell who I was in the picture or the writing, they might be able to scan my information.  Regardless, it makes sense to me to keep it in my wallet, so it stays.

Ø  Medicare:  Another obvious choice.  If I am ever hurt to the point I need to produce my Medicare card, I should have it on me, because I wouldn’t likely be in the mood to mosey out to the van to fetch my lifeline to good ‘ole Canadian Medicare.  Paying for medicine and filing through Blue Cross when we lived in the States was a pain in the backside.  Literally.  That’s where they gave me the needle.  This little credit card-shaped life-saver, with its expensive New Brunswick provincial logo and the Hopewell Rocks silhouetted in the background is staying on me, no doubt about it.

Ø  My New Brunswick Teachers Association membership card is staying.  I often need my membership number, and like all numbers, I can’t seem to commit it to memory.  Having this on me is important.  Having four years’ worth of them is not.  I kept the current one, but relegated the others to another pile.

Ø  NBTF Group Insurance Plan card:  I have to keep this, because I have no idea how insurance works.  If I’m ever in a jam, I can flash this bad boy, and all my problems will go away.  Or at least someone can point me in the right direction.  There’s no expiration date on it, so I’m good with that one.  And like the NBTA membership card, it’s paper rather than plastic, so it’s much thinner and easier to conceal in the billfold. 

 

Ø  I have a road-side assistance card which we acquired when we bought the Grand Caravan last summer.  Of course, this was not in my wallet last week when I locked myself out of the van while it was running in the school parking lot.  I actually didn’t realize that I had roadside assistance, but thankfully a kind colleague helped me out with her CAA, and I was on the road in a jiff.  How did I not know?  Beats me.  My wife says I don’t listen to her enough.  Score one point for her, apparently.  To never be in this situation again, I definitely need to keep this in my wallet, because it would do me little good in the glove compartment.

Ø  VISA and Debit Card:  These are equally important, and for several reasons, most of which are obvious.  A simple break-in, and I could have either my credit card maxed, or my bank account emptied.  A would-be thief would be disappointed with what they found in either case, but you get my meaning.  If you know me at all, you can imagine the colourful language that would spew forth when I got to the cash register only to realize my method of payment wasn’t in my pocket.  Cash, you ask?  I don’t carry more than $20 at a time, and even then it’s rare.  Predictably, there were no bills in my wallet at the time of purging.  We’ll get to the change purse later.

Ø  I opted to keep only two club or membership cards in my wallet.  Really, I could keep both in the dash, but for as often as I use them, and the little space they occupy, it’s better for my peace of mind to just leave them where I can reach them easily.  I chose to keep both my Co-op and Costco cards at my fingertips, simply because I use them frequently, and I would be better served to have them on me than to rifle through my console.  Both cards are primarily used for fuel purchases.  I generally dislike Costco, but I’ll reserve that for a future entry.

All told, I kept six plastic cards and three paper ones, amounting to nine in total, before looking at the picture holder and the change purse.  Here’s a run-down of what I opted to remove:

Ø   Social Insurance Card:  I got this when I was sixteen, and I still have the same actual card.  It was once white, but now is green/grey, and several chunks are missing, yet the number is still there.  I couldn’t commit this number to memory until I had to fill out time-sheets as a supply teacher every two weeks.  It’s safe to say I can remove it now.  I heard they don’t even issue physical cards for your SIN anymore. 

Ø   UNB Student ID Card:  Since I haven’t been a student at UNB since 2009, this one was an easy choice.  Three years’ worth of validation stickers are slowly eroding from it.  I still have my old St. Thomas ID from 1993-1997.

Ø  Firearms License:  Yes, I have one of these.  I own a rifle.  My dad keeps it with his collection, and I can’t even remember the last time I fired it.  My license is for possession only, as opposed to the acquisition variation I would have needed if I wished to purchase more firearms or ammunition.  Wished, in the past tense, since the National Firearms Registry has been abolished, and I am not sure if this card is obsolete or not.  Regardless, it’s long-expired, and is now more an artifact than a necessity.  I used to use this whenever two pieces of photo ID were required.  I used to joke that it was my prison ID card, because I look like a fellon in it.

 

Ø  Medicare:  Yes, I already spoke of this.  Except that was my own card.  This is my son Kieran’s card, which expired in 2010.  My wife keeps the boys’ Medicare in her purse.  I had his card in my wallet when I once had to bring him to the doctor a few years ago.  It might have been the time when he fell off the bed and needed stitches… on Superbowl night.  I watched my team, the Saints, win their first championship at the Chalmers emergency room.  Kieran was so brave that night.  Holding his Medicare card brought all that back.

Ø  Gift Cards:  I have plastic gift cards for the following:  Future Shop; EB Games; Chapters; Tim Hortons; Mastercard.  I don’t have any way of knowing right away if there is any money left on them, but I’m willing to bet there’s less than a dollar’s worth total between them.  Of course, I can use the left-over in conjunction with a future purchase, but will I remember that I have them in the dash whenever that situation arises?  I guarantee I will forget, because I obviously forgot they were in my wallet in the first place.  They’re all plastic, so they took up a lot of space.

Ø  Library Cards:  I’ll describe the other membership cards I found, but first, the NB Public Library cards.  Plural, you ask?  I have both the boys’ cards as well.  I also have the key-chain card with the scanner code for Kieran’s account.  With these, it was less for convenience, and more so that I wouldn’t lose them elsewhere.  It’s worked so far, but they are cumbersome, and we rarely go to the library.  Having all three has come in handy though; I once borrowed all three’s quota in CDs.  I hope I don’t owe any money on their accounts; I’m pretty sure that would be a parenting-fail moment.  They can stay in the dash.

Ø  Membership or club cards:  I have cards from the following:  Ultramar’s Valuemax; Value Village’s Supersaver (of which I am disgruntled, because I have yet to see any purpose in this), and my Bull Moose Frequent Buyer Card.  This is a fantastic second-hand music and entertainment store in Bangor.  I only get to Bangor once or twice a year, but if I left the card in my van, I might not be in the States in my own vehicle, and I would be quite mad if I missed a chance to use my membership card on an infrequent visit.  The deal isn’t great, but it’s better than a kick in the pants.

Ø  There were also miscellaneous pieces of paper with valid information stuffed in there.  I have hastily scribbled passwords, account numbers, and phone numbers I absolutely need to keep on me at all times.  I question the wisdom of keeping passwords in my wallet, but again, if I need my Scholastic account number in a pinch, it’s there.  A couple weeks ago, I couldn’t log into my own blog account because I had actually forgotten the password.  Once I went through getting a new one, I wrote it down on a piece of paper which has my Scouts Canada, Youtube, Apple, and Google ID numbers, email, and even my cell phone number.  The way I see it, worrying about password security is like locking your door.  If someone wants in badly enough, they’ll break the window and climb in anyway.  You should still lock your door though.

I also found receipts, some of which were necessary to keep, coffee club cards from various shops, a Carleton Cards stamp card, various phone numbers (some even with names on them), and even scraps of paper that I couldn’t even read from so much wear.  I used to keep a valet key for my old Caravan, because I once locked myself out of it, and thanks to the valet key, I would never again find myself in such a predicament.  I mentioned earlier that the change purse also adds to the trouble of my fat wallet.  The old imprint of the shape of the key is still there behind the billfold.  Yes, there are lots of coins there, especially pennies and nickels, but who else has a handful of small spare Lego pieces in their wallet?  Colby got a Toy Story Lego set the last time he was in the hospital, and we needed to make sure the extra parts got brought home, so my change purse seemed a logical solution at the time.  Three months later, it’s time I think to get them out and into the boys’ Lego bucket where they belong.

Last but certainly not least is the photo sleeve.  I have my wife’s university graduation picture from 1996 when we first started dating.  I have my boys’ baby pictures, and a few family photos from before Colby was even born.  All are worn and faded now, and the writing on the back is smudged and illegible.  They have survived remarkably well though.  They were in my wallet in 2003 when I accidentally wore it into the ocean when we were in the Bahamas.  They were buried so deep, the water didn’t even get into the little plastic sleeve at the heart of my wallet.  If they’ve survived this long, I feel like it would be wrong to remove them now.  If I had to keep anything in this long laundry list, these pictures would be at the top, even though I have duplicates of them in photo albums.

Going through these little cards and souvenirs was a great experience.  I’m a pack rat by nature, and I’ve never disputed that.  I spoke of three piles for the cards I removed from my wallet.  They were for keeping in the wallet itself, keeping in the dash, and the third pile was for keeping in my desk drawer.  I have a small wooden box there, about half the size of a Kleenex box, in which I keep card-sized mementos from over the years.  That old St. Thomas ID card is there, as is my first Blockbuster membership, and countless other keepsakes.  One day I’ll organize them into a photo album, maybe even with comments.  I tell myself that one day my kids and grandkids will appreciate the effort I put into telling them the story of my earlier years, long before I lost my memory and my spine was permanently warped from so many years of sitting on a bloated, overflowing wallet.

40TW194

Foreword

It’s only appropriate to write a blog entry about time after having been away from ‘The Fence’ for so much of it.  I’d like to say that I did my best over the last few months, but in truth, I really didn’t.  There were lots of opportunities to get new entries out, and no lack of material to cover, from social commentaries, world events, bizarre news stories, and just random observations (which are the most fun to write, by the way).  There was also a lot of the real world happening, which none of us can truly escape, and which can have a very restricting effect on how you spend your down time, if you’re fortunate enough to have any, that is. 

That’s the whole point.  Time is not free.  Time is money, and investing the majority of mine to make it is the crux of it.  Investing in what, you ask, time or money?  It could be argued either way I suppose.  It’s like Emily Haines’ observation in a great Metric song a while back, “buy this car to drive to work/drive to work to pay for this car”.  There is no doubt that time is fleeting while I’m teaching, especially at this point in my career where I work really hard to be not only effective in the present but attractive to rehire in the near future.  What I found—and I spoke of this in “Quit Stalling” back in September—is that after investing so much of myself into work, writing took a back seat.  Not like the back seat in your car, but more like the back seat of a bus. 

In my own defense, though, I did some writing in the interim.  I once found myself awake at 2am writing postcard fiction, composing as many as seven or eight odd pieces that both impressed and frightened me a little.  I’ve never been a postcard writer, although I’ve dabbled in it here and there, but never to my satisfaction.  These, as oddball as they turned out, are interesting, and completely abstract to the point that I question their effectiveness.  I’m still debating how or when they’ll be published, whether in the short- or long-term, or indeed if ever. 

I also spent a significant amount of time composing my year-end Top 20 Albums list, which functions almost like a blog all its own.  It nearly got posted to “The Fence”, since initially the blog was envisioned to contain my music blogging as well.  After a few entries, I liked where the Fence was going, and I’ve long-since closed the door on posting album reviews and lists to it.  They’re apples and oranges.  Perhaps a second blog for strictly music talk may be on the docket, but since I’ve had scant time to work on the first one, it seems foolish to think I could maintain a second with any consistency.  I have long-imagined a music blog called “From The Left Field” in which I just randomly choose album titles I enjoy and discuss their merits, but that remains a long way off.

In terms of “The Fence”, I have bits and pieces of about five different essays, three of which could arrive one-two-three, all in the same day.  I don’t like doing that though, because those who are kind enough to read my work shouldn’t be inundated with too much for one sitting.  I have an informal length for my essays, to keep them coherent (which doesn’t always happen, but arguably, therein lies the fun in blogging), but also to keep them digestible for readers.  Not that my readers couldn’t read more, it just seems more humane to limit how much I ramble.  I’m prone to ramble in person, so I can only imagine the tedium of a boundless written rambling would be.

I realize as I’m typing that I am rambling already, so I’ll wrap this part for now.  For archiving’s sake, suffice it to know that the next few blogs will be ideas culled from observations and ideas from as far back as early October.  They may or may not appear chronologically.  They’ll all see the light of day sooner than later.  Music writing is wrapped for the foreseeable future, and short of any future unscheduled middle-of-the-night postcard or poetry sessions, The Fence is back on for 2013.

“40TW194”, or “Time In A Bottle”

One thing we would all like to be able to do is maximize time.  We can’t invent more of it.  We can’t reclaim it once it’s gone.  We can’t even define it.  All we can surmise is that it is linear; we know it moves forward only, and by the means we have developed to measure it, we know it moves in even increments regardless of our perception of it.  There are times when we know it moves unbelievably quickly:  vacations, good television shows, lunch breaks come to mind.  Then there are those times that agonizingly crawl, to the point you almost feel like you’re suspended in time itself.  These are the proverbial ‘waiting for toast to pop’ moments, such as traffic lights, grocery store check-outs, banks, snail-mail, Tim Horton’s drive-throughs, or those last few hours before you can call it a day and head for home.  Of course, we all know that time by our own understanding of how time ‘works’, the minutes and hours are no different in any of these situations, but clearly there are times when we perceive time itself either quickens or slackens. 

In that last paragraph I used the word ‘time’ seven times, and pronouns in its place at least a dozen more.  Time defines us.  Our very lives exist because of it.  We define the success or failures of our lives by how we maximize the time over which it occurs.  About half of it is devoted to recharging our energy, via sleeping and eating specifically.  A significant amount of it is expended on work, or toil to maintain comfort for the remaining fraction we have for leisure. 

During the course of my day, typically I wake at 6am, spend the next hour preparing myself and the boys for our school days ahead, and that is before I even start the car.  I typically arrive in Minto around 8am, having spent the better part of an hour delivering my kids to daycare, waiting for my carpool, and making the transit to my work-place, which is farther than most I would imagine, but my reality nonetheless. 

My school day begins in earnest when I arrive, and ends anytime between 4 and 5 pm depending on the day and what my schedule permits.  There is no telling when meetings, clubs, or other unexpected things are going to happen, and occasionally there are evening events that could keep me at school until closer to my natural bedtime, which would otherwise be between 10 and 11pm, but those are few and far between.  Normally, I drive another hour to get home and retrieve the kids, before supper is prepared and consumed, usually by 6 or 6:30.  Two nights a week the boys either attend Beavers or Cubs, and on those nights, we could be home as late as 8 or 8:30pm.  I am fortunate that my kids are old enough to get themselves prepared for bedtime, otherwise I’d be committing even more time, and indeed it wasn’t long ago my wife and I did.  So, all told, between 6am and 8pm, my day is jammed.  Oh to be able to tack on a few more hours—I can’t even imagine how I’d use them.  There are at any given time half a dozen things I plan to do, should the opportunity arise.  Sometimes unexpected hours do materialize, just at the expense of others.  Snow days, for example, occur about three or four times a school year on average, and as of this writing, we’ve had a whopping one so far.  Happening the last week before Christmas break, it was a godsend for sure, but I found myself sleeping in late, correcting some math quizzes, and reading for (gasp) pleasure.  That day didn’t crawl, I guarantee that.

That’s why I find weekends are so valuable.  After so many years of working most Saturdays, I find that one of the great payoffs for becoming a teacher is that my weekends are mine.  Mind you, I still need to eat and sleep, plus I need to recuperate time lost during the week with my family, and any teacher worth their salt will tell you that weekends are optimal times to both catch up on grading and planning.  Short of calculating minutes and hours, which would be likely both handy and scary, weekends are no home run for slacking off time either.  Holidays, which include long weekends, Christmas, March Break, and the summer months are the real relaxation opportunities.  Don’t forget that there’s home maintenance, commitments to family and friends such as birthdays, anniversaries, social engagements, and the like.  There’s grocery shopping, banking (whether online or in person makes little difference), and any other miscellaneous errands we have to run.  Oil changes, garage visits, veterinarians, dentists, emergency outpatients, telemarketers we couldn’t dodge, unexpected visitors that never seem to drop by at convenient times…

What we come to realize is that time and all the ways we spend it defines who we are.  If you have too much free time, you’re not working hard enough.  If you have too little, you’re working too hard.  No one has the balance figured out.  Some of us have to work long hours to maintain the same comfort level of others.  Some worked hard earlier in their lives, only to have earned more free time later.  Some retire at 55, some 60, some never do.  Some even retire earlier.  Some never work at all.  Some, of course, are unable to, and their lives are arguably the worse for it given what prevents them from being able to in the first place.

It is remarkable then that we put such an onus on ourselves to define who we are with what scant time we have.  I define myself best I think by how I spend time with my family.  How I raise my children reflects what kind of father I am, and one day, was.  That’s one of the reasons we have children in the first place; we survive in part by how we pass on what we have learned to our offspring.  Genetics play no part of it.  Those who never have kids make their own impact on people around them.  My great-aunt left a tremendous impact on me, yet she never had children of her own.  People adopt all the time, and those children benefit from parental guidance the same way traditional child-rearing does.

Some of us want to live forever.  I for one do.  I’ve made no bones about it; I want to live a long time, partly because it’s natural for us to want to prolong our lives in the first place, but because I want to see how the future will unfold, for better or worse.  In my lifetime, I have seen technology unveiled that makes me giddy with anticipation at what’s to come.  Since the world didn’t actually end in December, I’ll still have to go to work, probably until my mid-sixties, and then the sky’s the limit.  I’m counting on science to advance exponentially, so any of my poor habits contributing to my equally poor health will be counter-balanced by those top-notch scientists we spend so much money funding figuring out a way to prop up my carcass far beyond the current life-expectancy of someone who uses too little of his current available time to exercise, or that time allotted to eating to choose better, healthier foods.  I also want to live long enough to see my kids grow into adults, make all the choices they will for better or worse, and to maybe one day welcome grandkids into our home, to lay on a beach with my wife while the grandkids run up and down the shoreline looking for beach treasures the way I used to (and still do when I find the time).

Every once in a while, if you stop long enough to notice, you come across news events or articles that give you a different perspective about time and what it means.  A few months ago, I stumbled across the story about a little carrier pigeon that was employed by the British government during World War II.  About a quarter of a million of these little feathered heroes were deployed during the European campaigns of war almost seventy years ago.  Many never reached their destinations, due to natural predators and other unexpected obstacles.  Most did, and it makes sense, because if more pigeons than not didn’t survive, they’d never use them in the first place. 

A nice couple bought a rather expensive townhouse in the ‘80’s, and after renovating a walled-in fireplace and chimney, discovered the remains of countless birds that had got stuck in the deep crevasses of brick and mortar.  It was a grizzly enough discovery, until they found a bird’s foot and leg with a tiny canister affixed to it.  The tiny, red cylinder, about the width of a Crayola marker cover, contained a small piece of paper with some strange coded letters, some of which weren’t even from the alphabet.  The obviously elated couple held on to their find, and a few months ago, finally decided to look into it.  They sent the remains and the note to the experts, and as it turns out, the bird was indeed a carrier pigeon with the designated code name ‘40TW194’ delivering a message of the highest importance from the front-lines to the MI6 offices only a few blocks from the home in which the couple found it.  The British government has since set about the arduous task of decoding the message, because apparently of all the possible codes it could have been are archived.  I’m imagining a big warehouse in the fashion of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  As you might expect, there have been no further updates, because apparently a seventy-year-old war memo is probably still considered a sensitive document.  For all we know it might have asked someone to water the plants.

Why is this story so compelling?  It seems this little bird managed to do something we all want so desperately to do:  it cheated time.  The bird’s own death didn’t even stop it from doing what it set out to do.  It flew home, got a bit lost along the way, but by the grace of unexpected outside intervention, finally accomplished its mission.  It has also come back to life, if even just for a little while.  And if someone digs up this blog years from now, little Forty-Tee will revive once again.  That’s the great answer to the riddle of time.  To live forever, you need to make your impact while you’re alive.  Of course, you can’t extend your own consciousness beyond your own life, at least for the time being anyway.  But you can make an impact on the world around you.  The first half of life is the one we live.  The other half is how people remember us after we’re gone.  We know this because it matters that we have grave stones, obituaries, things named after us, and other things that make up our ‘legacies’.  For me, writing helps fulfill that.  Raising a family, being a good neighbor, and even teaching children all fill that spot for me as well.  As much as I plan to live a good, long time, I know that eventually it will come to a close, and then the next half depends on how well I prepared before that time arrives. 

Some people make time capsules.  People throw messages in bottles into the ocean, hoping against all odds that someone somewhere will answer the call.  In fact, a bottle with a message that was tossed into the Atlantic Ocean from the New Jersey shore (there is a real place called that) was recovered on the coast of Ireland recently by a small child.  Imagine the excitement he felt reading a message that was sent several years earlier.  The content was irrelevant, but the message itself was an extension of the person who sent it.

As my Christmas vacation draws to a close, and the routines of everyday life begin again tomorrow, I find myself thinking an awful lot about my time.  The fact is, I have two fantastic kids, an amazing wife who puts up with all my idiosyncracies, and lots of stories to tell.  Even in the most pressing of times, I can do lots of things to create my own legacy.  I don’t need to build a time capsule.  I don’t need to litter the ocean with bottles, although that still sounds really fun.  After all of this meandering, I guess the whole point is carpe diem after all.  Until we learn how to actually control time, or even package it, we can only do our best.  And if you have a lazy day along the way?  Don’t worry, there’s lots of time.