Mad Money

When I was a kid, I remember women talking about their "mad money." Little bits of cash they stashed away from the family budget because they were mostly housewives with no income of their own.
I always wondered whether they meant it was money to be spent madly on some non-essential luxury, or money that they took with them when they stomped out of the house angry at their husbands. In my young imagination fueled by any trashy novel I could sneak into my bedroom, I envisioned women like my soft voiced aunt and my smiling grandmother in her flower-print house dress sitting on bar stools in some dark, beer-smelling tavern knocking back shots, buying rounds, and slinging their mad money at the startled bartender. "Oh, he makes me so mad!" they would say...one in English and one in Italian...and later they would help each other stagger home, glaring at their respective husbands and not one bit repentant.
Most likely, mad money was a combination to those women. And it is even more likely that it was used for emergencies when finances got tough. I think they talked about it more than they ever spent it on themselves or in a fit of anger.
I had my own mad money method, left over from the years after my divorce when I saved anything I could, any extra dollar here or there. That was literally it...a couple of dollars saved in a drawer, a book, a pocket, always worried that I might be a few dollars short of something we desperately needed. Once stashed, I never touched most of it because as things usually do, everything worked out. Nobody needed an emergency appendectomy, root canal, or bail money. The wolf, although he sniffed around a few times, never actually got to my door. I never lost the habit though, because there was something about knowing there is money earmarked for nothing-in-particular-but-just-in-case.
The whole financial crisis reminded me again about my mad money. I considered that if I had taken those ones, fives, tens and handfuls of change from the old purses and pockets, drawers and unused teacups, and invested it in....oh, lets just say the stock market...today I would have mostly zip. True, I could have put it in the bank and collected interest...at 2%....and I would have made mostly zippo interest and would have paid taxes on the zippo. Not to mention that seeing a lump sum in a bank account might have persuaded me to use it more readily.
So, I'm thinking that what I finally did with my mad money was probably a good thing. A couple of summers ago I gathered it all up...found it truly amazing what you can save in little bits over 20 years...and went to Italy. I had a mad-ly good time.