</Hey there, and happy December, otherwise known as the last month of 2020 fuckery—and the portal to some other dimension.
I spent Thursday morning on the phone with the bank which for me is tantamount to a root canal without Novocaine.
To be completely transparent, I was on the offense when I started the call. You see, SOMEONE had made a big mistake, making overdraft transfers to cover two checks paid out of an account that had carried a balance of $2 in it for like, ever.
Just for context, that account has been dead to me for years.
It was from days of yore, from an old life when I was fancy and moved money around from account to account because that’s what I was taught you do with money— you move it around. You have the bill paying money, money saved for Europe, money set aside for property taxes.
You get the gist, blah, blah, blah, never mind, it is what it is.
Anyway, there it sat that ancient account, out of sight, out of mind. Occasionally, with its staggering $2 balance, I could feel its audacious Judgy McJudgerson attitude toward me—slow-blinking its disapproval at the mundaneness of my current life. So I just ignored it, like it didn’t exist.
Except it did.
In a parallel universe where I go by the name I had before I got married! A universe where I have literally $2 in my account, but I still have checks so I write them out of phantom checkbook books that aren’t real and haven’t been for twenty years!
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
If you’re at all like me (and I know you are) not only have you spent 2020 baking too many cookies, you’ve also Hazeled the shit out of your respective domiciles because let’s face it—you didn’t have anything better to do.
The one drawer I never got to was the one that houses my outstanding bills and my checks. It is seldom used because… it’s the twenty-first century and most of my banking is done online. And since my house is as old as the lint in Noah’s navel and because that drawer is so ridiculously deep it can’t be used for anything you don’t want to send a search party after—I have organized it in a way only I understand.
The newer used checks live in an open box in the front. Duh.
The older used ones exist in the middle. A metaphor for life.
Boxes of new unused checks line the sides of the drawer. And I have to tell you, they do it in the most embarrassingly satisfying way that it leaves me breathless. It’s like the drawer was made for them! There they sit, perfectly fitted pieces of a deep-drawer-puzzle. If I ever finish a box and have to throw it away I will probably panic and have to seek professional help. (That last part, that is called forshadowing).
That brings me to the checks I take photos of for mobile deposits. Those buggers are free-range, loose and unencumbered, inhabiting the dark unreachable recesses of the back of the drawer. (Have I mentioned that the back of the drawer resides in a different zip code? It does. Don’t challenge me on that.)
Folded in half and left to their own devices, the mobile deposited checks wander this bad neighborhood like pirates and I only mention this because I’m convinced that at some point this year when I was busy not living my life—they managed to open a portal to another dimension thereby sabotaging the check drawer.
Here’s what happened: The nice lady from the bank insisted that those two checks were written from an old account.
I insisted, using all the best adjectives, that that was impossible.
She read the numbers on the bottom to me and asked me very nicely to match them to the ones in my checkbook.
I mumbled obscenities, went and found my checkbook, and just about died when I saw the name at the top (see picture above) because that is not my name and it hasn’t been for twenty years!
Then I ran, like a hobble-footed, older woman wearing shearling Birkenstock sandals, a gazelle, over to that check drawer to somehow prove to Belinda (the nice bank lady’s name was Belinda) and myself, that something supernatural was afoot because even though I was holding a book of time-traveling checks in my hand—they couldn’t possibly exist.
Belinda was gracious in that way mamas teach their kids to be in the mid-west. And Canada.
She hardly laughed at all as I proceeded to toss that sinister, trouble maker of a checkbook back into the drawer while pawing through boxes to look for accomplices. But things took a turn when she asked me the simple question, “Do you want to close that account?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Then can you tell me if there are any other checks that need to clear, or was it just those two?”
“I can’t imagine, but lemme look.”
“No problem.”
But there was a problem. As hard as I looked I could NOT find that phantom twenty-year-old checkbook!
“You’ve gotta fucking be kidding me!” I said, pulling the drawer all the way out of the wall, tipping it upside down, and spreading it’s contents onto the floor with my foot.
“Pardon?”
“Oh nothing, its just…I can’t seem to find that book…”
“But you just had it.”
“Right. I did. Didn’t I? I mean, shit, am I going crazy?”
“Noooooo…you’re not crazy,” Belinda replied unconvincingly, folowed by a long, uncomfortable pause. Then finally, “It is 2020, who isn’t a little crazy?”
Poor, sweet, Belinda. Now she was so far down my rabbit hole she was pretending I was sane so I wouldn’t feel bad. I hoped for her sake she wasn’t moonlighting as an actress—because she sucked. Bless her heart.
I spent the rest of the afternoon shredding things that should have been shredded years ago, and finding things I didn’t know were lost. Like an old silver dollar, an address book from 1999, and ticket stubs from a museum in Italy.
But still no checkbook. It has literally vanished. If you can explain that to me I’ll buy you a puppy.
Carry on,
xox JB
