MISS MONEYBAGS

Here's my #3/27 story, from "Secrets of Men and Women." This was day-3 of maintaining my daily one-page output––What happens when a windfall of money falls into your lap.

MISS MONEYBAGS

It was in all the evening papers. When the moneybags fell out of the back of the Brinks truck people rushed to the scene from all directions. It was wild. Folks who saw it from their cars described it as a free-for-all. Men and women, young and old, were scooping up bills, shoving them in any available pocket as fast as they could, then running off as fast as their legs could carry them. And the armored truck had just kept on going. The driver and guards had somehow been unaware of the six bags tumbling out of the rear door. They had driven on for two blocks and turned a corner before the rear door had swung open, alerting them to the disaster. Caught at a traffic light it had taken them several minutes to backtrack down their route for the lost money. And they found nothing left. The scavengers had taken it all, every last cent. The papers had reported that Brinks had lost 1.2 million dollars when the bags hit the pavement, but the real undisclosed amount had been closer to 4 million. They had hushed up the total to save the reputation of the company.

In the car traveling directly behind the Brinks truck when the money fell there rode a young woman with her two year old child strapped into a seat belt. This mother, head of a single-parent family, welfare mother, stopped just in time to avoid hitting two of the bags. Her car came to a halt right next to the biggest and fatest one of them all. She opened her driver's door and had to give it a slight push to force it over the top of the bag that blocked her exit. In one motion she grabbed it, slung it over her lap to the floor on the passenger's side, closed the door and drove off.

Strangely enough, the first thoughts that came to the 28 year old woman was that if welfare found out about her bag of money she would lose her $500 per month of assistance. She had become used to supplementing her small monthly checks with jobs that paid under-the-table, unreported money that helped her provide for her young son and herself. That's how she regarded the money in the bag.

For the next four years she kept the money in the same place, hidden in a greasy rag under her spare tire. On a camping trip she had counted it out––over a million. From that point on her attitude towards life had changed. She smiled a lot. Little problems didn't bother her. She had patience. She was calmer. Knocked off drugs. Returned to college. Cared for her child. Just knowing it was there seemed to have restored her self-respect.