The Checking Account
Posted by restorel66 on April 23, 2008
The checking account balances like this:
A statement arrives, sits around, gets lost,
reappears, is opened. An angry child
writes out his frustration on it. You
find a moment and, frowning, add
a neat checkmark next to each spending
“activity” that hopefully appears in your ledger
with the same dollar amount. If it differs
you circle it. If it’s missing altogether you
circle it good and hard with your black pen.
“It’s ready,” you say, “Whenever you have a chance”.
Eventually, I take the statement, the ledger,
and a solar powered calculator and begin
a mathematical puzzle that is more
art than science. They’re just numbers,
a previous and present balance that,
with all the scrawl, has begun to resemble
Picasso’s Don Quixote. Those checkmarks
spin around on crazy little windmills and I
ride a scribble horse to chop them to pieces.
april, 2008
