My grandma used to give me a twenty-dollar bill on my birthday. She was a woman who lived her life in shades of beige, proudly claiming it as her favorite color: beige sweater sets, beige leather sofas, beige cars. Her curly apricot pixie cut was the lone accent color in her skin-tone story. Besides the money, she only ever gave me butterscotch candy from her pocketbook (pronounced “pock-a-book”), a deeper shade of neutral.  

I pinned the bills to the corkboard above my little desk, waiting for the right thing to spend them on. It was the late ’90s and many delightful things could be bought for twenty bucks, even in New York City: lip gloss, a crystal from the new age store, an Old Navy tank top, comic books, glossy magazines from the corner stand, a couple movie tickets. 

With my basic needs otherwise provided for, the paper money offered the possibility of indulgence, an opportunity to enact something about my young self through the act of purchasing. In other words, I was supposed to participate in that consummate form of self-creation in a world shaped by and out of money. But nothing seemed to hold as much value as the paper bill itself, which carried with it a very particular meaning: “money from Grandma Dottie.” And so each year a new bill was added to the board, forming a grid of Dottie’s twenties.  

I did not, in adulthood, retain this propensity for saving my bills. Or, rather, the income of a writer and a PhD student did not leave much space for saving. Plus, numbers in a checking account did not have the same significance as gifts from Grandma. This, at least, is the story I tell myself to justify my lack of a 401(k), a mutual fund or even a flush checking account. There have been numerous attempts in my adult life to become a saver, through tracking my spending, making budgets, auditing every expense and trying to cut excess. Yet, whenever I get close to that coveted prudential reserve, the administrative, bureaucratic, car-owning, dog-owning, renting world delivers an unexpected, nonnegotiable cost. I never account for them and yet they always come.