A Money Hole
By Dian Vujovich
Joy Morris is one of the very well-trained and delightful servers at the Triple Creek Ranch in Darby, Montana. I met her during my way-too-short visit there last month. Somehow we got talking about writing and she told me that she’d had a piece published. It was a poem about money. Of course that got my attention and I had to learn more.
Seems as though Joy was, and still is, a Sunday newspaper comics reader and around the age of 7 noticed an ad for a poetry contest on one of the funny pages. It promised a chance to be published. Hoping for that prize, she wrote and submitted this poem:
Hole in My Pocket
i got a dollar for my birthday,
fifty cents for sweeping the floor;
what happened with all my money?
for i have no more.
i think i bought a hershey bar,
a sucker and a ball;
now i’m searching through the couch
and up and down the hall.
what happened with all my money?
it just went down the drain.
i think i have a hole in my pocket,
or maybe something’s wrong with my brain.
Joy got her wish,the poem was published and I can’t help but think one of the reasons was because the piece was oh-so relatable.
Who hasn’t torn through the cushions of a sofa or an over-stuffed chair hoping to find a treasure trough of coins? I did that when I was a kid and definitely after Uncle Mac had been to visit. He usually carried change in his pockets and while I don’t know exactly how, some of it always found a way of coming up and out of those pockets then falling down between the cracks of the sofa cushions. Must have been magic, I guess.
And who hasn’t wondered how all of their spending money disappeared and felt genuinely confused about it? Guilty of that one, too.
As for the Hershey bar part, come on—think melted Hershey’s chocolates run through my veins.
Joy is now 24 and I asked her what, if anything, she’s learned about money over the years. Her answer: “I don’t believe in credit cards/spending money you don’t have. I think it’s the root of a lot of unhappiness and false security in our culture in general, and am thankful to be, for the most part, debt free.
Can’t top that.
P.S. If you, or someone you know, have written a short poem or little ditty about money please email it to me. Who knows, maybe it will get published too.
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