I can’t remember what David was buying – irrigation pipe, feed, tractor parts, it doesn’t matter. He was buying something that required cash (or at least a check) on the barrel, and so he had taken the farm checkbook with him. Transaction completed, he had written out a check and handed it to the seller, who paused, looked at him with a grin and said, “Nice pink check, Dave.” Maybe the guy didn’t say anything at all, maybe it was just his look that said, “Nice pink check, Dave,” but whatever happened, that little transaction whipped up on Dave’s manhood and spit on it.
Needless to say, he was a little less than happy with the resident bookkeeper when he got home. In my defense, I didn’t know the multicolored checks I had ordered included a pink option in the mix. I had just wanted something a little different from the dull-as-dirt green checks Dave had been using since the ’80s. Of course, I should have known better than to tamper with “the way things are done around here.” Dave doesn’t change his address, he doesn’t change his occupation and, apparently, he doesn’t change the color of his checks. Unfortunately, I may or may not have ordered a few dozen of the new kind. A few dozen stacks. Can I help it if for every three boxes I ordered, I got a fourth one free? Am I to be held accountable for succumbing to the dangerous allure of buying in bulk? So … it may well be that for the next 20 years every third check we write will be, uh, blushing.
Just to be clear, Dave is not the only victim here. Ordering those checks en masse bought me my own source of misery. If you look at our farm register, you will see the check numbers are all over the place. We start in the 1200s, then we skip to the 1600s, before backtracking to the 14s and so forth. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why in the hay nanny nanny we couldn’t keep our numbers in order. I felt pretty sure we both could count past 100. Then the light dawned. I realized that David thinks whenever he finds a box of farm checks, he has found the box of farm checks. The financial fates that hate me have determined that every time the last check in a book is written, David is the one who will need the next one, and he will need it five minutes ago. He will charge into the office all-a-rush and start opening boxes like crazy, and as soon as he finds one with the Coleman Farm name on it, he will think he has hit pay dirt and grab the next stack. Did I mention how many boxes of checks I bought? The odds that he will grab the same box twice in a row are improving, though, with every dangerous run-in he has with the bookkeeper. Now, I get to decide if I should insert the skipped checks out of order, cycle round back to them or burn them to heat the house.
Admittedly, those blasted pink pieces of paper are a fitting representation of our bookkeeping life together. Dave and I live a southern Idaho financial drama of low stakes and risky ledger-keeping. I am the six-months-behind bean counter, and David is in charge of cash flow – in, out and down the drain. One little source of marital friction is: Dave thinks he has the memory of a farming sphinx and will recall every transaction he transacts, and so he doesn’t write things down. Or he writes one-word descriptions for me like hay, cash and seed. My fatal flaw is: I get around to doing the books on an emergency-only basis, so by the time I am deciphering Dave’s scrawls, any hope we may have had for his memory has long been undone by the sands of time.
“Dave,” I’ll say, “this deposit receipt says slprgdn on it. Do you remember, was that the name of the buyer, or have you taken to selling slprgdn on the side?”
“When did I write it?”
“August 21.”
“Michele, that was five months ago. How am I supposed to remember that?”
“Well, you remember that it snowed 8 inches on Thanksgiving Day in 1975.”
“That’s because Dad had bought a new four-wheel-drive pickup that year. What did I write on the actual deposit slip?”
“Cash. 425 dollars.”
“It was hay.”
“Sure, Dave; it’s always hay. Who then is slprgdn?”
“I think it was that guy from out of town who has a couple of horses. Drives the blue Dodge, always brings his dogs with him.”
“And his name is slprgdn?”
“I can’t remember his name. He has a nice trailer, though. Just put CASH.”
If you take a close look at our books, you will see we buy a whole lot of some kind of generic seed we grow into lots of hay we sell to someone named CASH. We also employ a complex check numbering system that can only be deciphered by the gods – and for some inexplicable reason, we skip every third check. If we ever get audited, I’m actually going to feel sorry for the IRS. I might even invite our auditor to our annual pink-check bonfire.
.jpg?t=1687979285&width=640){kind=logo}
