In both The Eye-Dancers and The Singularity Wheel, Mitchell Brant, Joe Marma, Ryan Swinton, and Marc Kuslanski can’t help but notice how inexpensive things are in the variant town of Colbyville. In The Singularity Wheel, in fact, Ryan manages to secure a room in an inn for just $5 a night. Prices like that make the boys think of period-piece movies, Beaver Cleaver, black-and-white still lifes from a bygone era, speckled with cobwebs.
Indeed, I once worked with a woman who, every year, upon receiving her annual “cost-of’-living” raise, would grouse, “Well, three percent of nothing is still nothing!” Many of the other employees would nod their heads in agreement. We all notice the increase in prices ($4.49 for that box of cereal? $10 for a standard book of twenty stamps?) and are caught in the current of escalation as it continues along on its slow, steady, and inexorable march.
It has gotten to the point where there are plenty of people, reasonable people at that, who argue that coins should go the way of the dodo. “Who needs ’em anymore?” a friend of mine said just the other day. “All they do is clutter up my jacket pocket.” And I had to admit, he had a point. But I’m also glad we still have our coins, our one-cent, and five-cent pieces.
Our dimes.
In the economic milieu of the 21st century, a single dime cannot purchase much of anything. But it wasn’t always that way. Take comic books . . .
Nowadays, to buy a single issue, you need to plunk down $4. But jump in an imaginary time machine, become ten years old again, and pretend it’s 1950. At that time, a ten-year-old (let’s call him Kyle as a point of reference) might ask his dad for a dime, just one dime (“I’ll mow the lawn later, Dad, promise!”), and then head over to the corner store, where dozens of comics would be tantalizingly arrayed on a spinning rack. He’d browse over the issues, the rack squeaking as he turned it, hunting for just the right one, and, maybe, just maybe, he’d pick out a gem like Strange Adventures number 2.
This particular issue hit the newsstands in the fall of 1950, and for just ten cents, Kyle was rewarded with a glorious, end-of-the-world-style cover, four feature stories, fifty-two action-packed pages, not to mention tempting advertisements, a short picture-less sci-fi tale, and various illustrated informational blurbs scattered about the issue, one of which was called “A World of Thinking Machines.” This prescient piece laid out the groundwork for AI and advanced robots. In fact, thinking machines were not just figments of imaginative sci-fi enthusiasts. At the time of the issue’s publication, sixty-eight years ago, the article proclaimed the existence of a “metal monster with sinews of electrical wire that can solve the most intricate mathematical equation in minutes . . . [and which can] ‘think’ more perfectly than a dozen human mathematicians!” The next step, according to the piece, “will be the robot–a tireless, mechanical servant that will perform man’s duties in factory or office or on farm with the utmost efficiency. The metal workers will usher in the dawn of leisure”–which, the article concludes, will ultimately spread to the home itself, allowing for the “bliss of domestic luxury.”
That was a lot of material for a humble dime’s investment. It brings to mind, in the cold, hard light of 2018, how far we have come, how much inflation has affected our world. This isn’t a diatribe against inflation–I’m no economist. Just a statement of fact. It elicits a certain nostalgia. I was born long after the phenomenon of ten-cent comic books. But there is a part of me, perhaps a substantial part, that hungers for a simpler time, a simpler age, when coins were cause for a child’s excitement and enthusiasm.
What is the value of a dime today? What does a single, solitary ten-cent piece, in and of itself, have to offer? Anything except the ability to break change? In a purely practical, utilitarian sense, perhaps not. But consider the dime from a different angle. Look at it with a new perspective.
For starters, the physical characteristics. I have before me a dime with the year 1993 imprinted on its copper and nickel surface. The left-facing profile of FDR stares at something we cannot see, his stoic expression etched for the ages. On the flip side, there is a lit torch flanked by an olive branch on one side and an oak branch on the other, symbolizing liberty, peace, and strength. The dime in my possession still maintains some of its original luster, even twenty-five years on, though smudges also exist, the result of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fingerprints coming into contact with the surface–some rubbing, some squeezing, some flitting across it for the briefest of moments, but leaving their mark just the same.
And those prints, those hands that touched this lightweight alloy of metals, have a story to tell. This dime could write a novel or a memoir if someone might just give voice to it. Was it stashed at the back of a dresser drawer, out of sight, for months or years on end? How many times did it get rolled and deposited into a bank? How many cashiers handed it out when making change, and when they did, were they focused on this dime, the customer, the next person in line . . . or were their minds drifting, wondering what they might do when their shift ended, if Jeff or Suzie would agree to hang out later, what they would eat for supper, or where they’d go on their next day off?
Did the dime ever lie in the belly of a child’s piggy bank, the ten-cent portion of a financial dream? Did someone perhaps drop it on a sidewalk or a parking lot unknowingly, or, if knowingly, without care? And did someone else later pick it up, pocket it, and add it to their jar of coins under the kitchen sink? How many cities has this dime journeyed through? Has it been to the West Coast and back? Was it in someone’s pocket as they toured Manhattan? Has it tasted the sting of dust on a country road in late summer, the sun shining, hot, the hands that fiddled with it salty and moist with sweat?
It’s true. A dime can no longer purchase fifty-two-page comic books that can mesmerize a child–or an adult–over the course of a lazy, leisurely afternoon. But the other things it can do, the narratives it can weave, and the lessons it can teach if we’re willing to look and listen and wonder and imagine are worth far more than a mere ten cents.
And all this time later, I’d like to think that Kyle, our fictional friend from yesteryear and now on the doorstep of becoming an octogenarian, would see it that way, too.
Thanks so much for reading!
–Mike
Eye-Dancers 