Febraury 12, 2021

Stocking the Pond

I get up at 3am to go to the bathroom. When I get back to bed I see I have a text from Lewberg.

“Do you still have that bucket of coins?” No ‘hello’. No ‘how are you’.

I text him back “What are you doing up?”

“Australian Open. I have a five-player parlay.”

That makes sense. Lewberg likes to gamble. Mostly sports betting but he really likes to bet on everything. He can’t watch a game without having a few dollars on it.

“Five player parlay?”

“I need Putinseva to win the third set.”

“Putinseva?”

“Yulia Putinseva. From Kazakhstan.” Lewberg sounds annoyed I don’t know an obscure tennis player who has made it to the second round.

“OK,” I say.

“You still have that bucket?”

I am pretty sure nobody else in the world is having this conversation. But this is par for the course with Lewberg.

“Lewberg. If you are strapped for cash I will write you a cheque. We don’t have to revert to the bucket of coins. Those days are long gone.”

The bucket of coins had started, as you would imagine, as a jar of coins. Coins emptied from my pant and coat pockets at the end of an evening. They would first land on the dresser or night table, and then eventually wind up in the jar. Pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. The one jar turned into two and then I think my cleaning lady, correctly assessing that I was not hosting elaborate dinner parties, transferred the contents of the two jars into a glass serving bowl. Their residency in the glass bowl however was short lived as the coins were soon overflowing, and so they unceremoniously made their way to another receptacle I had no use or would ever have any use for - a paint bucket. I still have it, it is nestled in the corner of my bedroom.

“Yes” I reply. “I still have it.”

“Then why do you live in that junkie house?” Lewberg texts with a smiling emoji.

Three AM and Lewberg is making jokes. It is, in part, a testament to the folklore about the bucket and how its existence has become ingrained in my life and in my story.

In this instance, he is referring to the time I had invited my friend Eric, his wife Randy, and his twin boys over for a backyard BBQ in an attempt to reciprocate for the many meals I had had at their house. I rented a small bungalow, it was the only house on the street which had not yet been torn down and replaced with a modern behemoth. The house was admittedly ramshackle and I had not done much in the way of renovations or decorations. This led one of the boys to innocently and famously ask why I lived in “such a junkie house.” His parents, aghast at their son’s words, immediately demanded he apologize for the slight. He, confused by his parents’ consternation, mounted a defense “But,” he argued, “I know he is rich. I saw his bucket of coins in the house.”

The irony, of course, is that at the time, that bucket of coins, was pretty much all of the money I had in the world. I had transitioned careers - my Uncle Henri had fired me for the third and last time - and had gone into hock and credit card debt in order to launch an eBook business at a time when eBooks did not exist. For a time, that bucket funded every pizza slice, every cup of coffee, every newspaper which passed through my front door portal. I never counted it. Never wanted to know how much was in there for fear it would depress me too much. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred bucks. But the kid thought he had stumbled onto El-Dorado.

Luckily, my fortunes turned but I continued to tell the story. Along with the time my electricity got turned off and the unlikely friendship I had forged with the lady from the American Express credit department. I joke about it but they were tough times. I had to borrow money from both my father and my brother. I have since moved to another, only slightly less junkie house, but I still have the bucket of coins. Somehow, I just haven’t been able to part with them.

“Can I borrow them?” Lewberg asks.

I, of course, know better than to ask Lewberg why. Nothing good can come of it. I will get embroiled in some sort of scheme which skirts both the law and morality and will have nobody to blame but myself.

So instead I say “My pleasure,” knowing it is very likely I will never see them again. In a way, Lewberg is doing me a favor. He is helping me make a decision I have been unable to make myself.

“You don’t want to know why?” He asks.

I don’t answer right away. I am trying to formulate a witty comeback but take a bit too long. Lewberg interprets my silence as tacit acquiescence.

“It’s for my Uncle Nate,” he volunteers. “He didn’t make it down to Florida this winter and he is going crazy. He used to spend every morning with his metal detector, the Bounty Hunter 1000, scouring the beach for lost treasure. So he’s taken to tracking down every coin in his apartment to see if he can find something old and valuable. He even has a magnifying glass to look at dates and imperfections. He bought books and spends hours on the internet researching.”

“Jesus,” I say, “poor Nate. So where do I come in?”

“He is out of coins. My cousin Shelly said he could really use a new batch. She said nothing would thrill him more than getting a bucket of coins.”

“Ah. Got it. So you told her...”

Lewberg cuts me off.

“So I told her I think I knew a guy.”

Lewberg’s Uncle Nate is a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. Think Walter Matthau in The Sunshine Boys. I saw him a lot more later in life when he retired to Florida. We sometimes golfed with him or had lunch at the deli. He sent a lot of things back. He was a misery, almost a caricature. I would like to say he got worse after he lost his wife, Lewberg’s aunt, to cancer but he was always a little glum. A little stoic. Even back in the day.

Somehow, we developed a tradition where he would take us, Lewberg, Goldfarb, and I, fishing once a summer. It was always the third Saturday in July. It was, we discovered one year, rain or shine and no rain checks would be issued. He would provide the fishing rods, the bait, a six pack of beer which we could divide however we decided, and a dozen chocolate donuts from Tim Horton’s. We would fish for three hours. From 8am to 11 am. 

Now there is nothing unusual about early morning fishing. Nate had a cottage up near Bracebridge in Ontario’s Muskoka region. In theory, we should have driven up on Friday night, slept over, then gone fishing the next morning. But Nate didn’t want us sleeping over. Instead, we drove for two hours early on Saturday morning.

The cottage was on a tiny, pristine lake called, I can’t make this stuff up, Pickerel Lake. Pickerel, for you city folk, is a type of fish. The type of fish which was found in the lake. Now you would think this is the lake where Uncle Nate, Lewberg, Goldfarb and I would have gone fishing.

But you would be wrong.

Instead, we loaded up Uncle Nate’s truck and drove about twenty minutes south on Highway 11, just before the Gravenhurst cut off, where we turned east at exit 42. Exit 42 by the way is the exit we drove by on the way to Nate’s cottage.

“Why can’t we just meet him there?” Goldfarb and I must have argued the first year. And Lewberg must have said “because he doesn’t trust you.” Which was fair enough and we never questioned it again.

Now if you drive eighteen minutes east after getting off on exit 42 you are going to reach a place called Miller’s Trout Farm. This is where Mr. Miller and the Miller kinfolk stock a moderately sized pond with trout. They basically filled the pond up with so much trout that it was impossible not to catch something. I think it might have been $25 per car and then $10 for three hours on a row boat. The Miller motto was “catch and release but one” - each person on the boat could bring home one trout. By the end of the day Uncle Nate would have four trout in the cooler which had originally held the beer. We would release the early caught trout because nobody wanted to drink out of cans which had lain with the fish. I don’t know what Uncle Nate did with those fish. I assumed he ate them. It’s not like we ever had a cookout or anything. We fished for three hours. Then his duty was done. It was if it had been court mandated.

I don’t know how many summers we did that. It could have been ten.

And for ten years, every time Uncle Nate would make the sharp left turn at the faded and splintered wood sign which said, in yellow paint, Miller’s Trout Farm, he would exclaim “If you want to get laid, you go to a whorehouse.”

Every time.

I don’t remember him saying much of anything else. It’s not like he was taking us to a whorehouse. He was taking us fishing. He never elaborated. Never told us his philosophy on life. We got it. A stocked trout farm. Still, it got to be a thing. The anticipation of him saying the line.

“If you want to get laid, you go to a whorehouse.”

Plus, the beer, the donuts, and catching fish we knew we were going to catch.

Which is why, after Lewberg’s text, I know what I am going to do.

I am going to stock the bucket with my own trout.

I am going to seed it with some rare coins.

Now I have some coins I had collected. Some ancient Greek and Roman coins. Some silver dollars. But those won’t do. They would be too obvious. So I call my coin guy. Lewberg is not the only person with a guy.

Nothing fancy - three pennies, three nickels, three dimes. Late 1800’s, turn of the century, early 1900’s. The nine have a face value of 48 cents and a collector’s value of about $300. Won’t make me even for the years of fishing, but it will get me close.

The coins come by courier and, like a lotto hostess shuffling ping pong balls, I mix and intermingle them into the contents of my bucket of coins. As I plunge my hands deep into the bucket, grabbing and redistributing fistfuls of coins, I am reminded of the time my friend Karen brought her kids over for Halloween and I, no big surprise, was completely unprepared with any treats so instead dragged out my bucket of coins and offered a two-fisted free for all instead. The kids, wide-eyed and excited, each took turns and, if I remember correctly, the option for one re-do in order to extract the biggest bounty. I had candy the next year and the year after that but the kids insisted instead on the bucket of coins. By then they had cagily figured out how to aim for the parts with the most silver I think we ended up doing that for about five years. Then the kids got older and trick or treating, even with the prospect of free money, became less appealing. And also, a little less rewarding. Finally, one year, her youngest, Joshua, left me with a parting “lots of pennies dude” jibe which more or less put an end to that tradition.

Lewberg arrives a few minutes later and I ceremoniously present him with the bucket.

“Regards to Uncle Nate,” I say.

“I really appreciate it,” says Lewberg. “He is really down in the dumps. Starting to be nice to people.”

“Well it is my pleasure. He is welcome to anything he finds.”

“Is he going to find anything?”

I know Lewberg can keep a secret but I also know he might get a kick out of knowing I got screwed out of $300 worth of valuable coins. It is a win-win. So I just say “A lifetime of loads for a coin laundry.” But when Lewberg gets to the door, I can’t help myself. “I might have sprinkled in a handful of valuable coins,” I say smiling. “If you want to get laid....”

“No shit?”

“What can I say? We curmudgeons have to stick together.”

“You’re a good man,” says Lewberg.

A week goes by. I text Lewberg. “Any word from Nate.”

“Yeah,” replies Lewberg, “and I quote. ‘You brought me a bucket of shit.’”

I try again a week later.

“Any word?”

Lewberg texts back “Bucket of shit.”

Week three, Uncle Nate finds the first of the planted coins. Then another on week four.

“Some of this isn’t complete shit,” is the report I get from Lewberg. I guess it feels pretty good. I am bringing a little cheer during difficult times. It is worth every cent.

Then, on week nine, a text from Lewberg:

“Did you plant a 1969 Canadian dime?”

I text back “No.”

“Are you sure?”

I am sure. A 1969 dime would be worth ten cents. It isn’t one of my trout.

“I’m sure.”

Lewberg texts me an image. It is of a 1969 Canadian dime. I have never seen it before.

“It’s not my plant. Why are you wasting my time with this?”

“It has a large print date. Very rare.”

“Fuck off!”

“Nate just got it appraised. It’s worth $25,000.”

“Jesus!” I say. “It was in my bucket?”

“Yup. Nate is going through the contents with a fine-tooth comb. Said the large date just jumped out at him.”

“Twenty-five grand?”

“Maybe more if it is in mint condition.”

“I could have paid my electricity bill.”

“Worse. You could have used it to buy a slice of peperoni.”

“True.”

“He’s going to donate it to Sunnybrook Hospital. In honor of my late aunt. He wanted to know if you were ok with that.”

“Yeah,” I say, “that’s a fantastic idea. Catch and release eh?”

“Yeah,” says Lewberg. “Catch and release.”

“Wow. Twenty-five grand.

“Yeah.”

“He went through every coin in the bucket?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess I didn’t have to stock the pond after all.”

“Yeah, well us Lewbergs don’t need any help to get laid.”

The end.