In the men's room of Harvard Square's Border Café today, after lunch, I spotted a shiny quarter resting heads-up in the toilet basin. This presented me with a bit of a quandary, as I
have been out of work for several months now. How committed could I really be to my indolence, if I could not be bothered to roll up my sleeves and dig out this quarter, which might well purchase me another hour or two of joblessness?
Assuming that I was an unwilling participant in some Harvard field study and that a well-placed camera (perhaps in the air freshener?) was webcasting my every movement to a panel of graduate students in a psych or public health department office, I elected, after a short period of reflection,
not to retrieve the two bits from the bottom of the bowl.
Would your finnicky-fingered Phutatorius have responded differently if the quarter had been a twenty-dollar bill? You betcha — the Andrew Jackson I know would have been floating on the water's surface, and with my house and car keys poised as a makeshift pair of tweezers, I likely could have fished him out without dirtying my hands.
And with that I bring to a close my Toilet Trilogy (Airport-John, Cris Collinsworth, and now this last $.25), hoping against hope that the lion days of March will bring some other, more inspiring subjects to belabor.
