A whole crowd of noisy housemates in the common room.

The room on Emerson street was uncomfortably small. The common area, right outside the door to it was often busy with five other residents, all young students trying to finish school. It had a T.V. in it, always on, as the other bedrooms were equally small, so most of the young men there (no women) would spend their time on the couch watching it, with the annoying noise gliding through my hollow door while I sat at my desk reading or trying to sleep. Even the one telephone was in the communal area, so private conversations were impossible.

This penury of comfort all that summer and fall hit me as utter madness on my part within the first days of moving into a nice apartment on 49th street, November 1st,. I had plenty of money to afford it. The room at Emerson was so puny I had no place to screw down and hide a strong box, (I always kept at least five thousand on hand in case of emergencies) so I took to the habit of hiding hundred dollar bills inside the uncut pages of certain obscure books I had there, so obscure and decrepit no one would even think of stealing them.

The pages were uncut because no one had ever bothered to read these books, but they hid the bills perfectly. Three of the four sides of every fourth page made an envelope. I found them at ‘Moe’s’ fully intending to actually read them. One was Roger Ascham’s ‘Toxophilus’ 1545, about longbow skills (I’d read that the prose of that book was especially fluid for its time). The other was a long, Latin commentary on Petronius’ ‘Satyracon’. Such were my tastes in those days (and my extremely wide range of reading, I might add). The two books contained about four thousand dollars and were mixed in on a shelf of twenty other dog-eared books. They were the two least likely to draw anyone’s notice, the perfect safe.

I still have a little collection of brown, schoolboy, Latin and Greek classics, ten of them, which I bought at Moe’s for a few dollars each when a poor student. They were in my backpack when I crossed the Rainbow bridge with speed in one. They went out West with me again, (I actually read most of them over the years, one next to Christine on that three day bus trip, with a very good reward). But in the Summer of 1986, living at Norma’s, I decided to take the opportunity to send them back to my mother’s in Niagara Falls. My sister Janet, her husband Bob and their three young boys toured the continent in their camper and stopped over for one night, for a break from the camper to sleep in real beds. I packed the books neatly into a shoe box and asked them to deliver them home. The camper was ransacked and robed one evening a week later while they were in a restaurant. Shoes and other small items were taken but my books (Western culture’s greatest treasures) were just dumped on the floor. Ignorant, petty thieves.

When I moved to 49th street I did buy a strongbox and transferred all that money, (or so I thought) to it. About four years later, living with my wife and son in Piedmont, I was culling through my ten-time larger library and took a box of some twenty ‘discards’ to Bruno’s house to sell at Moe’s (he’d just started working there), for any price. A week later I dropped by his place with John Seebach to do lines and sit up late and reminisce on old times. We were all older and changed with age and did this just a few times a year now.

Right inside the front door was the box I’d given Bruno and inside it were four leftover books which he told me were ‘unsaleable’. After several hours of animated talk at the dining room table Bruno went upstairs where Claire was waiting in bed and calling for him. John fell silent for a moment and I walked over to the box, just to see what books didn’t sell. Two of them were my old ‘Toxophilus’. I picked them out, a little mad at Moe’s tastes, and began leafing through one, and lo and behold, out slips a hundred dollar bill, right on the table. I was puzzled and began to search carefully through both and found three more I’d somehow stashed and missed years earlier. John woke up and I gave one to him, ran upstairs to give Bruno another and tell him the story of my old habit. He came downstairs and we all had a hearty laugh. Moe could have bought both for a dollar.

But thinking about it further that night I almost wished he’d bought them and put them back on his shelves and that some poor student and honest devotee of Renaissance English (for such a work would never be a class assignment) would take them home for a trifle and find the money. It would be a just reward for his noble love of older literature, a perfect case of poetic justice, all too rare in this ugly, base, modern world of ours.

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