The Frog Chronicles

For Sale

When you’re broke - as I often am - you look to sell things. That big-screen TV in the back room. Those expensive fly rods you hardly use anymore. That old Fender Telecaster you can only halfway play. Whatever it is that you have to spare that someone else might want. Whatever you can give up without too much regret.

It’s not fun, but it works. Or, I should say, it works for a while. You never get nearly what the objects are really worth, but you typically get enough.

Enough to pay that unexpected repair bill. Enough to keep the lights on. Enough to take someone special out for her birthday dinner.

But, enough is never really ever enough. You’re still living past your means. You’re still shelling it out faster than you’re bringing it in. And sooner or later, it catches up with you again. Sooner or later, you don’t have anything left to sell.

That’s where I’m at now. I’m down to the core. There’s nothing extra left to trade.

So, I’m selling my stories. My memories. The things I’ve done and seen that nobody else has.

Like the time I had sex with Lilly under a picnic shelter during a thunderstorm. I still have the ball cap she wore to dinner later that evening, after we got soaked hiking back to my truck. Or the poncho I wore that one time at Bonnaroo when I dropped acid with those guys from Tom Petty’s road crew. And the cowboy hat from the week I spent with a certain redhead on Grand Bahama Island. I eventually had to convince her husband, of all people, to transport my sorry ass back to Florida on his yacht.

But the general idea is brilliant, if I don’t say so myself. These little items are worth very little on their own, obviously. But when you consider their history, their provenance, well, it’s a different story. And that story is what matters.

Imagine the worth, if you will, of a single pair of gold hoop earrings - earrings that also carry the memory of 20 minutes spent making love on a porch swing with Kimmy, your then 22 year-old first wife. It was just a few brief hours after she had promised you forever. You begged her to lift up her sundress and straddle your naked thighs, and you nearly went insane when did exactly that. She’s gone now - lost first to an ugly divorce, then finally, for keeps, to ovarian cancer. But those hoops still carry the memories of how it felt. And the finality of her death, coupled with that fragile beauty she carried… well, those earrings have to be worth thousands, all things considered.

And imagine what I’ll get for my kid’s old wooden rocking horse. A person can’t look at that horse without seeing the way his face lit up when you carried it through his mom’s kitchen door on his birthday in 2002.  Imagine what someone ordinary schmuck would pay for that sort of karma.

Surely there must be thousands of wealthy people who have lived out their days working and doing what’s right, instead of chasing butterflies and pretty girls the way I have. Surely they’ll pay good money for all these memories. Imagine what they’ll give to be able to tell their kid’s kids about drinking wine on a mountain top with a woman you had - or, I should say they - had met earlier that day in an art museum, instead of how they spent that same Saturday at a desk. 

And I’ll finally be filthy rich, and I won’t need to remember those things anymore.