When I got home that night, I followed my routine of emptying my pockets into a catchall decorative ceramic bowl by the front door. On this particular day, the pockets contained my keys, wallet, watch, sunglasses, a half pack of smokes, a lighter, and the dime I found earlier.
Whenever my girlfriend Nancy goes to Clement Street on the weekend, it’s usually to pick up Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches for us. Before she heads out, she always raids the ceramic bowl for change to feed the parking meter, and on this particular fishing expedition, she was only able to scrounge a quarter and the dime I had found the day before.
As Nancy recalls the story, she found a parking spot across the street from the sandwich joint. The quarter got her eight minutes on the meter. The dime brought that time up to eleven.
Quickly, she hustled into the shop, placed and received her order and then high-tailed it out of there. As she looked across the street towards her car, she spied a meter maid placing a $65 ticket under the windshield wiper of the car in front of hers. Arms, flailing, she bolted through the crosswalk and was about to give the officer an earful, when she noticed that there was nothing under her wiper blade. She then checked her meter and saw that there was still one minute left on the clock.
If it weren’t for that dime that I picked up off the ground the day before, it would have been her car the meter maid issued the ticket to, and she would have been $65 poorer.
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