The Cosmic Implications of Two Quarters in a Sandwich Bag

by Richard C. Gray

I did my laundry today right after I ran out of good underwear. Unless you're a man you may not immediately grasp the rarity of such an occasion. I mean, I wasn't completely out of underwear, I was out of good underwear. Guys, you all know what I'm talking about. I still had a huge pile of all that other stuff in my top drawer. You know the other stuff. Some are barely recognizable as underwear, just a spider web of frayed knit barely clinging to a thick white elastic band. Others look just fine. Sure, they look fine. Some of that other stuff looks brand new. But don't be fooled. It's the stuff that doesn't quite fit right. We have the kind that doesn't quite leave enough room for your package to roam and hang free. Then, we have the kind that doesn't quite conform to the cliff your ass makes as it runs into your legs and ends up crawling up your crack as you sit in front of a computer typing all day. It's horrible. It's like an unbearable Chinese water torture ravaging your sun hungry regions.

Yet, despite all that, despite the uncountable number of holes or the fact that it just never treated your boys or their play ground properly, you normally still wear them. Sure they're uncomfortable. Sure they can barely be considered a member of the fabric family. But, when it comes right down to it, which would you rather do, put on that nasty pair you should have thrown away in the ninth grade or do your laundry as soon as the good pairs runs out? Usually, it's no contest. But today, I dunno, today was different. Today was strange. Today I would have an epifany that would redefine the limits of my Cornell educated brain.

I keep a sandwich bag on my dresser. Every time I buy a snack or for anything else pay with cash, I always come home and put the left over quarters in the sandwich bag. The same sandwich bag too. It's one of those nice Glad Lock brand sandwich bags that turns green when it's sealed. Nice.

So, I come home, and, for some strange reason decide to do my laundry simply because I'm out of good underwear. The really strange thing is that, at the time, I didn't think anything of it. Anyway, I count the quarters in my sandwich bag. There's only ten. That's right, only ten. It takes four quarters to do the wash for the lights. Then, it takes another four quarters to do the wash for the darks. Then, it takes at least another four quarters for the sixty minutes it takes to dry everything. For those of you who have successfully completed the first grade, that makes me two quarters short.

There are two laundry facilities in my apartment complex. One, is right next to my apartment, but has no change machine, and the other has a change machine but it's a five minute walk away. Ah, ha, I think, there is a coke machine in my laundry facility though. I'll just buy something and use the remaining two quarters for my drying. A fair deal, I think, fifty cents for a coke and I get to save my lazy feet the five minute walk to the change machine.

So, I get the wash going. Two quarters left. I'll I need is my coke and my change, then I'm set when the twenty six minutes goes by and it's time to dump them in the dryer. Then, something odd happens.

First of all, I try to put the dollar in the bill acceptor. It's one of those that has a picture by it of the way you have to face the bill in order to get it to go in. I get this perfectly crisp, I mean it's almost like a sheet of cardboard, dollar bill. I slide it in, exactly the way shown on the picture, and it won't take it. It just won't take it. Time after time after time I put this perfect, crisp, sharp enough to cut like a knife dollar bill into the machine and it just won't take it. What did I do? Out of frustration I eventually flip the bill around and put it in the exact opposite way pictured on the machine. Guess what, it takes it immediately like a hungry little robot from a low budget black and white 60's movie. It took the bill the exact opposite way it was supposed to take it. Then, I realize, the coke is in litter bottles, not cans, and it's one dollar. It won't give me the dollar back and there's no change coming my way.

So, with a crumpled, torn, jaded one left in my wallet I proceed on the five minute walk to the other laundry room with the change machine. A little unfair I thought. Well, I get four quarters from the change machine, with my torn dollar bill, then check my email while I'm there. The apartment complex has a computer with the Internet right by the wash room. I load up my hotmail account and it tells me I have exactly one new message. So, I click on my inbox and there's nothing there. Strange. Strange, perhaps, just enough to start the wheels turning in my head that led me to my epifany.

I walk back to the laundry room close to my apartment. By this time the wash cycle has finished. I load them all up into the dryer, place four of the six quarters in the dryer, start it, then look back at the sandwich bag. Then, it hit me. For those with six fingers, you know that there were two quarters left. As I looked deep into that sandwich bag I somehow knew that they were the exact same two quarters that had originally been in the bag. Suddenly, everything came together. All of the odd things that had happened that day unionized in the common madness of their different methods. Those same two quarters had been in my sandwich bag for months, maybe even coming close to a year now. In all this time, those two quarters had been huddling side by side in my glad lock sandwich bag evading the eager jaws of the coin op washers and dryers at the Maple Wood Apartment complex.

I shuttered, holding the bag in my hand and boggling my mind with the shear improbability that those two quarters had survived so long against a seemingly unbeatable natural selection for their eventual deposit in a sea of others like them. I shook the bag, watched them toss and clang before my eyes. There didn't seem to be anything to bind them together and yet together they stood. They stayed not just with one another, but they stayed with me, always.

As soon as I had set the dryer going I left the Laundromat and went for a walk, contemplating this apparent nexus of the universe that I had stumbled across. After about five minutes it all became clear. What I needed to do, became so serendipitedly obvious that I had no choice but to act. I had to do something before the universe entered an inverse expansion opposite to the thunder of the big bang and collapse around the two quarters in my sandwich bag. I went directly to the nearest Ice-cream machine and slid my little stowaways through the coin slot.

At first I thought I had succeeded in dismantling the intergalactic paradox placed before me. But, after an hour or so of deep spiritual contemplation I knew I was wrong. Somehow, those two quarters were still clinging together by the force of improbability deep in the belie of the ice-cream dispenser. And I also knew that one day, perhaps after buying a bag of pretzles or getting change after purchasing an apple in a machine, those two little hell raisers would find their way back to my sandwich bag. They would find their eager way back to me. I'd have to be ready for them!

Anyway, I ate my ice-cream. It was an ice-cream sandwich with chocolate gram cracker cookies. The cookies were soft, having absorbed the moisture and milky goodness of the ice-cream as it waited a month in storage to be stacked into the vending machine. It was yummy.