ATM envy

Plus the Links of the Week, featuring a resurrected story, Michael Stipe, and a very good dog

The other day I stopped by an ATM to get some cash. You know how sometimes the person before you leaves their receipt behind? There was one in the little slot when I pulled up. At first I just balled it up and tossed it in the car. But a few minutes later, at a red light, I took it out and looked at it.

Whoa.

When I posted it on social media, there were two main threads in the comments: “That’s just the CHECKING account?” and the related idea, “Whoever that is could really be investing their money better.”

My main thought, I’m embarrassed to say, was a brief moment of burning envy that we don’t have $734,234.72 in OUR checking account.

Our family is doing just fine. We can go to the grocery store and get what we want without worrying if we have the money to cover it. We don’t have to figure out what bills we can put off until next month. I’ve been on the other side of that and I know what a privilege it is to not have to worry about money so much.

But we always want more, don’t we?

I’m in the middle of reading a book by Oliver Burkeman called FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS, which I’ll discuss more in newsletters to come. The book is about how to think about the outrageously brief time we have on this planet — if you live to be 80, four thousand weeks is roughly what you get.

One of his many insights is that it’s so hard to be happy with what we have. Our whole system is designed to keep us clawing up the ladder, even after we rise high above our basic needs. Why do so many millionaires seem miserable? Because it’s killing them that they’re not billionaires.

I try really hard to be grateful and content. But then I happen to see that some random person has three quarters of a million dollars in their checking account, and for a moment it makes me feel small.

I think it’s OK to feel that. It’s not OK, I think, to constantly live with that feeling.

Here’s the main thing I’ve been thinking about since that trip through the ATM: I hope that person with all that money has found a way to be thankful for what they’ve got.

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10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. I replied to a viral tweet with a link to a story I wrote 15 years ago about a young black girl named Dorothy Counts and the white kids who taunted her on the way to school. That led to a bunch of people reading and discussing that story for the first time. Sometimes social media is worthwhile after all. (FYI, Dorothy — now Dot Counts-Scoggins — is still alive and still wonderful.)

2. My weekly for WFAE was about North Carolina redistricting, and looking at it through a different kind of court.

3. My friend Michael Kruse profiles Ohio senatorial candidate Josh Mandel, who (in my words, not Michael’s) is first among equals in a titanic battle of phonies.

4. In my earbuds: the audiobook HERE I ARE by Alex Belth and Emily Shapiro. It’s a true story, partly about how a couple navigates their love through serious illness, but also about how true love requires not just accepting your partner’s flaws but exposing your own.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book about the Westminster Dog show and the bond between dogs and their people, I’m using this slot for a dog story every week. This week: Alexandra Horowitz, a world-renowned scientist in the study of dogs, says goodbye to a good boy named Finnegan.

6. As part of my project to take those old novels off the shelf, I read David Guterson’s 1995 bestseller SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. It’s a murder mystery intertwined with several love stories intertwined with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, all set in a blizzard on an island north of Seattle. It took me a while to fully buy into the story, mainly because Guterson is fond of layer upon layer of detail — at one point, when he describes a character’s favorite authors, he lists THIRTY-SEVEN names. It’s the kind of “describe every blade of grass” method that almost turned me off of novels completely back in high school. But the story is compelling enough to make it worth wading through the detail. Thumbs up.

   (Should I do separate posts on these books as I finish them during the year? Let me know what you think in the comments.)

7. I’m always going to read a Q&A with Michael Stipe.

8. Your body knows you’re burned out.

9. RIP Mark Lanegan, whose band Screaming Trees was a big part of the Seattle sound of the early ‘90s. I always loved “Nearly Lost You.”

10. But my favorite Lanegan thing was the Seattle episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.” The episode featured Lanegan’s music, and the sequence at the end, set to his song “Strange Religion,” is a beautiful and haunting fade to black — even more so now that both Bourdain and Lanegan are gone.

— TT