I think I remember the day very clearly, but I was five, so who really knows. In my head, though, the events are crystal clear. My parents had been closeted in their bedroom/study all day. They did this once a month when they balanced their books, writing out sums of money carefully on ledger paper in a big binder and balancing each section of the binder precisely. I remember being increasingly upset as the frustration levels rose this month. Somewhere between the ledger sheet marked “cash” and the ledger sheet marked “miscellaneous expenses” they’d lost ten cents, and they were both hunting up receipts, reading off amounts from the two sheets to each other line by line, and generally working very hard to find those 10 cents.

I knew money was important. We didn’t buy candy at the check-out counter because it was too expensive. We walked a lot because cars were expensive. We didn’t put much jam on our bread because jam was expensive. We didn’t buy ice cream cones because they cost the same as a quart of ice cream — a quart isn’t nearly as fun as a cone, but it didn’t make sense to buy one person ice cream when we could have bought enough for all of us. Not that I ever thought we lacked for anything. I just knew that we thought very carefully before spending any money at all, and that at the end of the month meals got rather odd as Mom stretched our supplies to last through until the beginning of the next month, when we would finally go stock up at the grocery store again. (I remember asking many times what difference it made when we went to the store, out of curiosity rather than want, and I never did quite understand the answers, but that’s another story.)

So I knew these ten cents were probably very important, and I was sad that they were getting so frustrated, and I worried that something bad would happen if they couldn’t find those ten cents. So finally I climbed up on a chair and opened the little blue-green china tea pot I used as a piggy bank. Sure enough, I had a dime in there. So I took it in to my parents and gave them the ten cents they needed.

I’m pretty sure that this didn’t solve their problems — looking back, the problem was mis-matched ledgers more than it was a lack of ten cents. But that’s the day my parents decided I should get an allowance. Twenty-five cents every single Sunday for the next several years, mine to save up in my little tea pot until I found something I wanted to buy.