Coin Jar Fall Down and Go Boom
posted at 5:24 am
on Jan. 17, 2006
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My sister Virginia blew through here today. Technically she arrived last night, but I was so sleep addled that I didn’t get a chance to say “boo” to her until this morning.
This was the last step of a multi-phased operation to get her moved back to Calgary. She’d spent the previous week down in Portland, sowing wild oats or some such. Now she’s headed back to Calgary to settle in, at least for a while, at my Mom’s place.
Last week’s To Dos included getting me over to Vancouver Island, renting a van from Budget, getting her stuff from a friend’s garage to the Greyhound station, saying goodbye to Dan and his dog Dex over fish and chips in Saanich, taping up said boxes in the back of the van and slapping addresses and such on ‘em, and getting her and me back to the ferry in her beat-up jalopy of a car.
Along the way, we ended up at one point with nothing but a short dresser in the back of a big van with Christmas ornaments in the top drawer. Well, naturally, it fell over as we were driving up the main road between Victoria and the ferry. We assumed the glass ornaments were goners.
But in fact, when we stopped to swap vehicles, turns out that the ornaments were fine. But we were so concerned with the possibility of broken glass in the dresser, that we let a large glass piggy bank fall out of the van onto the sidewalk where it, naturally smashed into a zillion pieces. (Later Virginia determined there’d been more than U.S. $65 dollars in coins, which is hard to do when $0.25 is the biggest coin the U.S. government sanctions.)
We did pick up most of the coins, wet with rain and thus covered with tiny shards of pulverized glass, impossible to see in the sodium lamp light of deserted downtown Saanich (it was after 7 p.m. so the streets were empty.) This looks tragic, but it in fact highlighted the absurdity and crazy juggling of her moving schedule, and was kind of one of those “this can’t be happening” things that just makes you shake your head.
