I was in the post office buying stamps and chatting with the guy who knows more people than anyone else in My Home Town, and in return is liked by more people in MHT — Mark Deshaine. In case you didn’t recognize the name, or you’ve never mailed a letter here, Mark is the guy who heroically mans the counter on your left. While I don’t think he was hired for the job personally by Ben Franklin, Mark seems to have been there darn near forever.

He’s always a delight to talk to, and while I don’t remember what we were chatting about, I know it was as pleasant as all our convos. Anyhow, mid-chat I happened to idly scan the counter, and when I did, my eyes were drawn to that little cup that holds coins for the customers. At first my eyes were merely drawn to it, but then they were riveted to it.

I stared, gape-mouthed with astonishment. And what could cause that, you ask? Just this: in that cup, in addition to the usual plethora of pennies, smattering of nickels, and lone dime were three — count ’em, three — quarters!

I can remember when I first started seeing those change cups, sometime in the ’70s. They were only for pennies; in fact, they often had written on the glass or on a wee sign above it, “Need a penny, take a penny.” I say it was only for pennies, and while there was no rule about it, the simple fact is people wouldn’t have thought about leaving anything bigger. But a quarter? Eegads, back then that was real money. And guess what? To me, it still is.

Yeah, I know I’m out of it. It’s not something I try to hide — as a matter of fact, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen (and even anyone who won’t) that while I’m in the 21st century, I am not of it. I’m like a character from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, unstuck in time, physically here, but psychically gone, baby, gone.

I don’t like a lot about this century. I don’t like the styles; I don’t like the cars. The music, for the most part, is Feh. The athletes seem hyper-inflated with equal parts of ego, arrogance, and performance enhancing drugs. Corporations make ungodly profits, while raising prices to shameful heights and paying no taxes. Fast food, which has taken over the daily diet, is as unpalatable as our celebrities, who have taken over people’s time and psyches. And quarters are being tossed in change cups with nary a second thought.

Even the term “two bits” for a quarter seems to have dropped from our vocabularies. And more’s the shame, since it has a delightful origin. The Spanish Real (or Peso) was the accepted world currency, starting in the 15th century. In the U.S., it was widely accepted, and even preferred, as legal tender till 1857.

So where did the phrase “two bits” come from?

Well, as opposed to so many word and phrase origins that are either unknown or don’t seem to make sense, two bits is literal. The Spanish Reales were also known as Pieces of Eight because they could be cut into eight pieces, each one taken as one-eighth of what was to the peeps then, a dollar. A quarter of a Real, made up of two of the eight pieces, was — Ta-DA! — two bits, literally. Long after the Real, either whole or in parts, had vanished from the North American scene, the term two bits was in common use. Certainly, when I was a kid, and into my adulthood, the term two bits was used and understood everywhere, and four bits for a half buck was equally common.

And what was the value of two bits to me in my idyllic youth? It was a whole buttload of ka-ching, that’s what.

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A child of means

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When I was a kid, the quarter had some serious buying power. In fact, I can’t remember even having a quarter, except on Saturdays. And that’s cuz Saturday was the kids’ show matinee at the Pontiac Theater, where for our two bits we got to see around 20 cartoons; a bunch of short films (with the likes of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle, Buck Rogers, old cowboy flicks — where each six shooter held about 50 shots); and a recent feature film. That quarter, which people scoff at today, gave us around two hours of jam-packed entertainment.

What else could I get for a quarter? Well, in the health food department, I could get two plain doughnuts from Deissler’s bakery (where the Left Bank is now), washed down with a soda from Boynton’s candy store (where Kean Riley’s Curiosity Shop is). Or if I wanted to pass on the beverage and baked goods, I could get two Sugar Daddies, five root beer barrels, five sticks of red licorice, and a Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy bar.

But if I wanted to feast as a gourmet, not a gourmand, I could go uptown, literally and figuratively, to the Altamont Dairy Bar (now subsumed by the bowling alley and having vanished without a trace). The Altamont was pure class. The workers all wore crisp white shirts and pants and white garrison caps, the place was spotless, and their wares were upscale.

There was one in Tupper Lake, one in My Home Town, and one in Malone. Their stock in trade was their ice cream, made locally, and which wasn’t the mere equivalent of Ben and Jerry’s, but was its uncontested superior. The counter was long, having maybe 20 seats, and they served ice cream in its myriad aspects, as well as sandwiches and sodas. Most interesting was the machine that cooked hot dogs. It had pairs of barbs, arranged vertically, which were heated electrically. So in effect, they didn’t cook the hot dogs, so much as electrocute them (at least that’s what my pal Bob Griffin said, and because he was about five years older than me, he knew about such sophisticated things).

But as for me and the Altamont?

Well, a one-scoop cone was a dime, two-scoops was 15 cents, and a three-scooper was 25. But if I had a quarter in my sticky little hand, you can bet I wasn’t gonna nickel and dime my experience, literally or figuratively. Uh-uh, I was gonna go in high style, with an ice cream sundae. Unfortunately, a hot fudge sundae was 35 cents, as was a milk shake, so I couldn’t get top of the line, but compared to my usual ten-cent cone, I was still living large.

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A kid of letters

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So much for filling my belly; how about filling my mind?

I could do that for my quarter as well. For two bits I could get two standard comics like Green Arrow or Batman or Superman (10 cents apiece, with a nickel left for candy). Or I could get one standard comic PLUS one Classic Comic (15 cents).

In case you don’t know Classic Comic Books, they were for the aspiring intellectuals among the ragamuffin crowd. As the name implies, they were comic book versions of literary classics. The selection was huge and covered both American and British classic literature. And while adults might’ve dismissed them as trash — as they did all comic books — they served a great purpose: They exposed us to great pieces of literature we yet couldn’t read in script. So I got at least a decent idea what the essentials of those stories were. And in some cases, when I became a young adult and could read the originals, I realized the comic books were actually superior to a lot of the originals the critics so dearly loved, like “Moby Dick,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Tale of Two Cities” and so on.

But in reality, if it was intellectual stimulation I was seeking — especially for my developing love of satire and my nascent sense that I was sane and the world that was nuts, I would’ve bought a copy of Mad magazine, then 25 cents (Cheap!).

To me, Mad was a nautical chart for my psyche. It guided me through the stormy seas of life, without crashing onto the rocky shoals and left dazed and alone and carried away to the Sargasso Sea or some such.

Reading Mad also helped me develop The Dope’s Unified Field Theory. The TDUFT verified my suspicions about The World At Large. Essentially, it revealed, through Mad’s cartoons and lampoons, why nothing worked the way it’s supposed to, and that the powers that be were feeding us a steady diet of bumpf about life in general, and their competence in particular.

Slowly, as it was being formulated, I began to see that almost everything run by humans is a mess because almost all people at the top of the hierarchies are psychos and nitwits, or all too often, psychotic nitwits.

Thanks to Mad I could see when the emperors was butt nekkid, the heroes had feet of clay, and the worst school bullies weren’t the students, but the teachers, administrators and staff.

So now you might wonder if being so disillusioned at such a tender age made me scared of all the incompetence and incompetents who controlled so many vital areas of my life?

Well, I’m proud to say it didn’t. And that was also due to Mad, because thanks to them I adopted their slogan as my mantra.

Thus … What, me worry?