Since I have a terrible memory, I cannot say when this first happened to me but I do remember I was in a coastal town in Louisiana. I was responsible for the cash kept aboard our boat so I never let the cook go to town for groceries unless I was with him. We had a rather large purchase of supplies and I was paying in $100 bills. What shocked me was the clerk told me there were no bills to give me my change – all he had was coins. I received $37 and some pennies – all in change. Almost all of the coins were minted in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s. When I commented about the coins, the clerk said “Yea. Times are real hard. Most people are going into their piggy banks and coin collections.”
I am getting a lot of silver coins in my change nowadays.  I know what that means. I stopped at the local gas station where I have been buying gas for about twenty years. I know all the employees so I asked about a wooden cola crate setting on a stack of beer cans behind the counter. “Full of change! Get too much to keep it in the register”.
Wow. Now I’m beginning to think things may be worse than I thought. I’m really not very good at offering comfort. I do, however, think I have a knack for survival tactics. I have a lot of experience at that since I spent a large part of my life broke and eating fish and taters three times a day for weeks on end. Even then I found out it can get worse when there’s no money to buy the oil for cooking and worse still when there’s no money to buy alcohol for the stove.
Am I off track here? Well, maybe; but I just wanted to say that I’ve been there. I get a lot of calls asking “where do we go from here?” “What do we do?” Well, I don’t really know – not exactly. But I do say, “Don’t give up. I think better times are ahead and I’m going to do my part to help, too.”