"Spare some change?"

 Like many writers, my desk is a mess. 

More so now because I don't have my wife nagging me to "straighten up." Which I should add, she only did once a year. Though I often joked about it, I was fortunate Deb was never one to nag. 

She was the rarest of Jewish wives, in that she didn't come from money and she rarely henpecked me. Though on this Saturday morning (when I wrote this post), five months to the day when she passed, I would gladly give up the tip of my left pinky to hear her badger me while she went into one her energetic cleaning tornados.

Truth is, she recognized and respected my need for alone time so I could write these very important blog posts.

"It's your office, you want to keep it sloppy, that's on you," she'd say, "also light a candle, it smells in there."

"What does it smell like?", I'd reply.

"You."

My daughters, when they visit, are not so conscious about my architectural boundaries and will wonder in and poke through my belongings, sometimes stymieing my ability to craft the perfect marketing email. 

Last week my daughter found a velvet box on the shelf above my aging Apple iMac. It was a commemorative coin set given to me by my father in 1987, the bicentennial of the writing of the US Constitution. 

There's a $1 silver coin on the left and a $5 gold coin on the right. If you'd have asked me what they were worth today, I'd guess $6. 

The Siegels have never been lucky with picking memorabilia that would produce a windfall profit. In fact my father and my uncle collected coins and stamps in their pre-teen years that are no doubt completely worthless today. You know if someone could find those tattered books stuffed with the get-rich dreams of two poor boys from the Bronx.

Abby, who came across the set of Constitutional coins wondered aloud, "I bet these are worth something, particularly after seeing how our Constitution is being trashed today." 

And so she took to the interwebs and within seconds had stumbled upon some more info about the $25 trinket given to me in what seems another lifetime ago.

She found one seller online willing to depart with his commemorative coins, minted with 99% pure gold and silver, for more than $1000. I practically fell out of my Herman Miller chair that nows sports a squeaky wheel.

For the purposes of this post I tried to find that listing again, but the best I could come up with is this one...

Wow! That's a 28 fold increase in value for a coin set I frankly forgot I had. 

I guess I can exhale a little. Because if Honey decides to fire me for trying to slip one more subversive joke into the copy and the stock market crashes like a drunken Trump Boat Parade and my savings dwindle with the weekly purchase of Tomahawk steaks and expensive exotic spicy peppers from Thailand and Ecuador, at least I'll have this handsome nest egg to fall back on.

One last arrow in my quiver to keep me out of a dirty nursing home.