The other day, as I was loading the dishwasher for the third time that morning while discussing something important with my daughter, Clementine (multitasking!), I was vaguely aware of the fact that she was manipulating something in her hands. Spin, twist, pull—she spun the object around and around like a Rubik’s Cube, until finally, with a little sigh of triumph, she set it down, and I saw that it was a ballpoint pen. Or rather, it was the remnants of a ball point pen: what she set down on the table was just a pile of pen parts.
“My pen!” I said, chagrined.
She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s just a pen.”
“But it was my pen,” I insisted.
The eyes fluttered back again. “It’s a pen. They cost like five cents.”
At that point I turned my back on the new pile of dishes that had just materialized, and explained to her at great length that, unless you bought pens by the gross, they cost more than five cents. And besides that, it wasn’t like there was some sort of pen vending machine in my living room where I could drop in a nickel and get a replacement—to spend that “five cents” on a new pen would involve at least fifty cents worth of gas. And what’s more, even if I could walk to this hypothetical pen store where they sold you one pen for a nickel, it would still involve at least a half hour of my time, which, despite what she seemed to think, was valuable, so actually, even if it turned out they were giving away pens at the neighborhood pen store, it would still end up being something like a twenty dollar pen. To finish it all off I added that, besides, even if by some miracle there was, at this moment, a nickel-pen dispenser in my house, it still wouldn’t matter, because she didn’t have a nickel anyway.
At the end of this rant she rolled her eyes so far back in her head that she was probably seeing gray matter, blew out an enormous sigh and said, “Geez. It’s a pen. A pen. I’ll buy you another one.” And then she walked away. I sat down and tried to put the remnants of my pen back together, so flustered by my diatribe that for a moment I couldn’t even remember what it was that we had been talking about before the pen mutilation distracted me. And then it all came back to me: we had been talking about chores. And money. And how she didn’t see the point of doing one for the other, since she didn’t care about material things like I did, and therefore had no need of money. And, by the way, she was going to need ten bucks for lunch the next day.
At that point a vital spring launched itself away from my pen corpse and made its successful bid for freedom, and with a sigh I gave up and tossed the whole thing in the trash.
Look: I understand the whole love/hate relationship people have with work and money. I have it myself. (I love money—hate that I have to work for it.) And part of me is glad that Clementine has managed to retain such a charming naivete when it comes to worldly concerns: knowing that there is still even one person out there who is not concerned with the getting of “filthy lucre” is kind of like knowing that there still might be a remote tribe somewhere in the Amazon rainforest where the children have never held a game controller. It gives me hope. It gives me faith.
If only it gave me an unlimited supply of pens, I would be set.