The Story Of Eddy and the Quarter

With a moral of how money, used unwisely, can bring pain

Many years ago Eddy lived in an apartment with his mother and stepfather; this was when he was about 7 years old. It was one little part of the Chapel Apartments. It was not really a Chapel — at least not as Eddy understood the term, but he still felt that, as he was living in a Chapel, there really ought to be something…religious…about it. So long as there were no Nuns with rulers, or eternally-angry Priests.

In the kitchen of Eddy’s little 6 room apartment, which was on the ground floor, there was a stand-alone cupboard; a metallic, skinny and tall and ugly thing where his Mom kept all the plates, bowls, and such-like things. Eddy never thought about it at the time, but in retrospect: would it not be more sensible to have the heavy things at the bottom, and the lighter things at the top?

Eddy had already asked twice on a particular day for a quarter — the amount he needed to buy a new baseball. “Maybe, if you’re good today” said Mom. Later, Mom was in the living room and said to Eddy: go get the the big blue bowl from the kitchen cupboard. Eddy, thinking about that quarter, obeyed right away.

Now, the cupboard was twice his height at that time; or at least it seemed so. Sadly, almost anything seemed to him twice his height at the time. I understand that the mice in that apartment, though hunchbacked, seemed overly-large to him sometimes. Even the spiders seemed rather tall to Eddy on occasion. Being underground, the ground floor had its share of mice and spiders.

Mom and StepDad were having a gathering that evening, so the chairs from the kitchen had been moved to the “great room.” There was no step-stool or ladder. Eddy was not the kind of kid to ask for help…and I imagine you can see where this is going now. He wanted the big blue bowl, which was (of course) on the top shelf of the piece-of-crap cupboard. He started to climb the cupboard shelves. The whole thing came down on poor Eddy— of course it did.

Well, when Mom got the cupboard off Eddy, and all the broken crockery pulled off him, she was pretty pissed. One can’t really blame her I suppose, since Eddy broke almost everything that could be broken in that cupboard. He was probably lucky to come away without a sliced carotid artery, or bloody scalp wounds; but there was nary a drop of blood. But he did have a very large bump on his head. Not to worry though, because there was Mom to handle things.

“Eddy, go into my room and get a quarter from the box and bring it here.” Eddy felt a little better, though his head still hurt quite a bit. Even touching the bump was excruciatingly painful. But, he was going to get his quarter after all! That helped a little. Not so much, no.

Years later, in recalling this episode, Eddy said “only my mother would think it was a good idea to use a quarter to press a big bump on my head back into where it came from. Good ol’ Mom.”

And that’s the moral of the story: money, if used unwisely, can bring pain.