The other beginning started with a letter. It was a letter that wound up in the trash because that's where letters that ask too many questions belong. In the trash.
The letter arrived months and months ago and it took me all of two minutes to decide it had earned the right to be ignored. You want my mother's full name? And date of birth? And date of death? And SSN? I've seen that episode of CSI. I know all about the creepers that use information to cause harm.
But then another letter arrived. It asked the exact same questions. I can't explain why I considered it slightly more seriously than the first of its kind, but I did. I realized something critical: it wasn't asking for anything that Dr. Googles couldn't provide. Which, if you know how to ask Dr. Googles the right questions and it gives you the right answers, why not just fill out the form?
Fine. Whatever. Have fun with that information that hasn't meant anything for SEVENTEEN years.
SEVENTEEN YEARS. It has been over SEVENTEEN YEARS since cancer closed that book.
So I filled out the form and returned the letter and threw away all thoughts of it amounting to anything. There were discussions and considerations given that it claimed to be from an insurance company in North Dakota. That insurance company claimed they were making right on a policy. They acted as if there hadn't been SEVENTEEN YEARS between the day the claim should have been paid and the day they were offering to pay it.
North Dakotans do that, by the way. They don't have any sort of concept of time, so they'll act as if SEVENTEEN YEARS was just minutes ago.
I returned the letter and forgot about it. For months. Or at least I think it was months. Remember, North Dakotans have no concept of time. It could have been minutes.
Some time passed and I repeatedly and loudly proclaimed that I was right! It had amounted to nothing! She who had nothing left nothing in her absence. She didn't have the money to pay for life insurance. She didn't have the money to pay for groceries, for goodness sake. There was no employer who could have done it because her most prestigious job in all of her 45 years was as a cashier at Wendy's.
But then there came the notice that my signature was required to pick up a letter. I ignored it for a few weeks because of course I did. The post office is never open and why would I go out of my way for $10 or whatever it was going to be? No way was it more than $20.
I'm not a pessimist, I swear. I'm a realist who bases her assumptions on years and years of experience.
But I was wrong. Experience was misleading.
The dollar amount on that check wasn't enough to change lives, for certain, but it was enough to take care of a few long overdue projects. There's a new light in the foyer, the ridiculous countertops in the kitchen are taking their last breaths, and a few odds and ends are now less odd and definitely endier.
Not life-changing, but not insignificant either. A few pennies.
It took a while to figure out how it was that a few pennies just fell out of the sky, but with careful consideration, it became clear.
He has been gone for well over a decade, but it had to be him. He never bothered to mention that little something, not even when it should have been paid out. That's what North Dakotans do. They say a whole lot of words, but they never actually say anything.
Pennies probably never would have fallen from the sky if not for a little audit. A review of records led the insurance company to realize that something long past due was just sitting there. Collecting dust.
And now the pennies that collected dust are lighting up the night sky.
