January 13, 2014

Sometimes  You Have to Pay the Piper....er Kitty

Anyone who has ever played poker knows that each hand begins with an ante into the kitty.  In other words, to play the game you have to pay a fee first, so to speak, and anteing into the pot is a requirement.

I thought about that the other night while on the phone with my parents.  At Christmas time I had done a little holiday decorating at their house and removed their beloved old pottery kitty bank from its appointed  spot on the bathroom counter in order to put a little holiday decor’ in its place. 

In a somewhat frantic-toned voice on the phone, my mom asked me where I had stowed the kitty.  (I guess the spot where she usually sat in the bathroom was pretty empty without the bank.) I stammered a little as my mind raced in an effort to recall where I had left the keepsake.  Finally, thankfully I remembered where I’d safely stuck the kitty bank, and needless to say she was found and returned to her rightful spot in short order.

From as far back as my memory bank is wired, that kitty  has graced the bathroom of the house where we lived. I never gave it much thought although sometimes I wondered just why that was the case…..

Until now.  In the space of a few minutes, a secret regarding the keepsake kitty bank that I had never known was revealed to me.

Turns out that when my parents were first married the cat bank sat in the bathroom of their first home. Times were hard and every penny was counted in those days. Jokingly, my mom said that they used to charge their friends and relatives a fee to use the facilities.   Ten cents for youngsters, a quarter for adults, or something like that.  In effect their visitors had to ante up before they could play the game, I suppose you could say. 

That slush fund in the bathroom bank was then tapped whenever mom and dad wanted to see a drive in movie or take in the stock car races, or have some other sort of fun times together. And they never broke the bank but carefully used a knife to coax the coins out of the slot.  

So there is the rest of the story as they say.

A shake of the bank these days won’t bring one single ker-klink so I guess they drained the pot somewhere along the line.  But nevertheless the kitty bank is filled with my many memories and perhaps a couple of theirs as well.  

I have a feeling, now that the story is out, that there may just be some anteing going on in my parents’ bathroom kitty one of these days.  

After all you've got to pay to play!