Don’t Worry, There’s Always The Sock!

We live in a place where wildfires happen. Earthquakes also happen sometimes. And mudslides. Floods. You might wonder why we would live in such a dangerous place. The answer is that it is Marin County and it is paradise. Plus those things probably won’t happen to us as they only happen to other people. But if they did happen to us it’s ok, because we have The Sock.

A while ago, I finally caved to all the pressure and got an earthquake kit together. This is a really tedious thing you have to do when you live in earthquake country. Ideally, it involves filling several large plastic garbage cans with enough food, fresh water, and provisions for your family to survive out in the open for something like six weeks. When the Big One comes and your house falls down, you live out of your plastic garbage cans. You know, in a tent with foil blankets and canned beans and valium. 

In my old house, I had an earthquake kit that took many months to put together. I was very proud of it because it even had food for the cats and dog and a bottle of wine to ease the pain when the house fell down. Periodically when I ran out of wine I would raid the earthquake kit and drink the really bad bottle I had stashed in it. But I always replaced it. I am really glad there was no catastrophic earthquake while I lived in that house because it was a very damp property and eventually the earthquake kit became really moldy. If the Big One had come and the house had fallen down, we would have been forced to live in a moldy tent with moldy blankets drinking very bad wine. 

When I left that house, I had no earthquake kit for a while, because in my new place I barely had furniture so a kit full of emergency supplies was pretty low on the To Do list. But eventually I got furniture and I made it far enough down the To Do list to purchase one of those ready-made online Earthquake Kits that come in fancy backpacks you are supposed to keep in the trunk of your car. I keep mine in the basement because the trunk of my car is full of adult diapers and wound care supplies. When my house falls down in the Big One, I am hoping the basement will still somehow be accessible. Otherwise we are screwed.

With the fancy online earthquake kit backpack came an extensive guide on things you should do to prepare for an earthquake/wildfire/mudslide/flood. It gave me a headache just reading the first page, but one thing that caught my eye was that in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, the grid could go down and you won’t be able to get cash from the ATM. So you should keep some cash with your kit. 

I have always secretly liked the idea of keeping all my money in a sock. It’s not that I don’t trust my bank. They are a credit union and they treat their customers really nicely. But I know that when my back is turned, they use my money for other things without telling me. So it has always appealed to me to buck the system and keep all my wealth under the proverbial mattress. Since my wealth would not be very voluminous even if it were dispensed to me in quarters, I figured I could hide it pretty easily somewhere around my house.

One day I withdrew two thousand dollars from my bank account in hundred dollar bills. I brought it home and I rolled it up and put a rubber band around it. It made a pleasingly fat roll of cash. I felt a little like a drug dealer. Then I looked in my sock drawer for a suitable sock. Most of my socks are black. But I had this pair in the back of the drawer that I never wear, principally because they have a frill of lace around the top of them and even though they looked really cool in the store, when I got them home and put them on they looked really stupid. This happens to me more than you might think, and not just with socks.

So I put the wad of cash in one of the socks and then, so it wouldn’t look too suspicious, I folded the companion sock’s top over the wad of cash sock. I put them in the backpack where I keep our passports and other important papers, and I slung it on the top of my wardrobe. That night, I mentioned to my daughter that there was two thousand dollars in a sock in the black backpack on the top of my wardrobe. She was suitably impressed. So were all her teen friends who happened to be over at our house that night. So, I instructed the teens, if there’s ever a wildfire and I’m not home, drive far away immediately without observing speed limits, but bring the black backpack from the top of my wardrobe.

You might think I was a bit stupid to be telling a bunch of teens where all my cash was. But you would be wrong. I totally trust my daughter and all of her standup friends. Besides, it was not them I needed to worry about. Over the course of the next few weeks, I kept running out of cash at inopportune times. This was not a new phenomenon. Mostly when I look in my wallet there is a single dollar bill in there. Sometimes there’s, like, six or eight dollars and I feel really good. But now, I had The Sock.

So you can imagine. The two thousand got a bit whittled down. Sometimes Jessie would text me she needed cash for something and I wasn’t home. Take it from the sock became a bit of a habit. Soon there was much less than two thousand dollars in the sock.

Eventually, it felt like there was no real point having such a tiny sum of cash stashed in a sock on top of my wardrobe because if the Big One happened it would scarcely buy us dinner. So I replenished it. This time, I added a sticky note with $2000 and the date written on it. I reckoned it would be psychologically harder for me to keep taking hundred dollar bills from the sock if I had to write down on a blue sticky that I was doing so. Accountability, you know? It was not that much harder.

Plus I had told all those teens about The Sock, and every teen knows about ten thousand other teens on Instagram. So you really couldn’t call it a secret stash any longer. I may as well have put a message up on Facebook. Wildfire? Earthquake? Cash is in the frilly sock on top of my wardrobe.

My life is sort of a financial feast or famine. Sometime there is enough money in the checking account to cover all the bills and even to do something extravagant like buy airline tickets to somewhere very far away. Other times, I look at my balance and I go that can’t be right! Did my employer forget to deposit my wages? And I get confused about how the hell I could be a relatively well-paid professional and yet the sum total of money in all of my bank accounts has fewer digits to the left of the decimal point than I believe it should have. As you may have gathered, I do not spend a lot of time staying on top of my financial affairs. 

But the advantage of that relative looseness is that sometimes I have more money than I thought I had. So one day, I had a weirdly large sum of money in my checking account and I took some of it out and fully replenished The Sock. Now it contains the same sum as the one I mentioned at the start of this blog post. Nearly. Except for that time last week when I needed groceries. 

Plus I have moved the sock. It was just too obvious, the whole top-of-the-wardrobe thing. And it was hurting my arm every time I had to drag the backpack down from there and sling it back up. That thing is full of important papers and things I think I will need in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, so it is heavy. Now it is in a top secret location under my desk and only Jessie and I and a few select teens know about it. So you know what? Get your own sock!