September 15: Money Tree, Sistine Chapel, Happiness

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree.  It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves.  Its flowers were government bonds.  Its fruit was diamonds.  It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

So it goes.

A money tree.  It's a good dream.  Twenty-dollar bills getting old and falling in the autumn.  Bonds blossoming and blooming in spring and summer.  Ripe diamonds littering the ground.  And, of course, all the human greed feeding its roots.

I have always had money worries.  Most months are a game of which bill can I put off paying for another week.  That's the product of having advanced degrees in poetry and fiction and teaching as a contingent faculty member at a university.  It's the path that I have chosen, and I accept the struggle.

Money won't make my life eternally happy and blessed.  It would lessen my stress levels, but it certainly wouldn't fulfill all my dreams.  Maybe a few of them.  I've always wanted to visit the Sistine Chapel, see Charles Dickens' writing desk, pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  But money won't buy a lifetime of happiness.  My sister had hundreds of thousands of dollars in her retirement accounts, didn't really have to struggle to pay her bills.  Yet, the last couple years of her life were sickness and decline.  Money couldn't help her.

Tonight, I am going out to dinner with my wife, daughter, and my daughter's boyfriend.  I will probably order a drink.  Or two.  Then, I'll go home and watch a couple episodes of Breaking Bad with my family.  Tomorrow, I'm going to a day-long poetry event in another town.

Saint Marty doesn't need a money tree.  He has all the happiness he needs this weekend.