Money In The Maytag

 

As if by magic, he pulled a folded one-hundred-dollar bill out of a pile of gray lint.

“Look what I found,” he said, waving it in the air with a flourish.

My wife and I stared at him the same way we did when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. You know the look - mouth slightly open, eyes fixed, brain scrambling to processes what the eyes have just seen.  Talk about money laundering. 

It’s a rare day indeed when an appliance repairman comes to make a service call and hands me money before he leaves, but that’s exactly what happened. My wife Carol had called an appliance repair company, and at the appointed time, Gabe the repairman, came to look at our dryer, which had  begun producing an annoying, high-pitched wail. The sound was somewhere between a smoke alarm with an attitude and a teakettle experiencing emotional distress. It was so bad that the last time we dried a load of clothes, about two dozen howling dogs showed up on our front porch.

Of course, the fact that we would even attempt to have an appliance repaired is unusual in itself. Normally, when something like a dryer goes bad, it’s not repaired, it’s replaced. That’s just the way things work now. Most people call it planned obsolescence. I call it the Law of Lowe’s.  Once an appliance crosses a certain age, it begins making noises that suggests it’s on its last legs - and possibly on fire.

We were also painfully aware that buying a new dryer wouldn’t just mean paying for the dryer. There would be delivery fees, setup fees, installation fees, removal fees, disposal fees, and, if the installer so much as set foot in our hallway, probably a “walking through the house” fee. Suddenly, that old noisy dryer seemed worth saving. 

And then there was the small matter of the missing hundred dollar bill

We knew, without a doubt, a couple of years ago, a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill had disappeared into the dryer. I will not go into detail about how this happened, other than to say I didn’t do it. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it - I’m just saying there was someone else who lives in the house who was responsible. 

Long ago, I had accepted that the money was gone forever. Somewhere between socks and lint, it had entered another dimension. But after only about fifteen minutes of work on the dryer, Gabe announced that a treasure had been found.

Actually, several treasures.

In addition to the hundred-dollar bill, Gabe found enough loose change to fill a small piggy bank, more folding money, a couple of old keys, a credit card we had long since canceled, and an old photograph I had been looking for and assumed was lost forever. The dryer, it turns out, is not just an appliance, it’s a vault.

As we marveled at the valuables Gabe laid out on the kitchen table, I couldn’t help myself.

“What’s the most unusual thing you’ve ever retrieved from a dryer?” I asked.

“First of all,” Gabe said, pointing to the pile in front of us, “this kind of thing isn’t unusual at all. Happens all the time. But once, I was going through dryer lint and found a ring. The stone was so big I thought it was costume jewelry. When I showed it to the lady of the house, she burst into tears.”

It turned out to be her grandmother’s diamond ring. She had been looking for it for years and thought it was gone forever. No telling what the thing was worth. She offered Gabe a reward, but he refused. After all, it belonged to her. 

I just shook my head.

I regularly turn on the History Channel to watch those treasure-hunting shows. I’ll admit it, I’m hooked. For more than a decade, I’ve followed a group of people searching for buried riches on a program called The Curse of Oak Island. Every year, I’ve watched them spend untold millions of dollars and come up with nothing more than a few rusty artifacts and a lot of dramatic pauses.

They use bulldozers, massive drilling rigs, sonar, metal detectors, and ground-penetrating radar. They dig hundreds of feet into the earth. They sift through dirt by the ton. And after all that effort, they celebrate finding a scrap of wood or an old button like they’ve discovered the Holy Grail. 

Meanwhile, Gabe comes into my house, spends fifteen minutes with a phillips head screwdriver, and finds more treasure than those guys ever have.

Maybe the Oak Island folks should quit digging holes and start checking clothes dryers. It seems like the odds are a lot better, the equipment is cheaper, and there’s a chance of finding at least a sock.

I’m just saying.

#curseofoakisland, #moneyinthedryer