Life of Wry

In the next installment of I Don’t Know Anything About Anything, we have this conversation:

Jim: [eagerly] When was the last time you saw a silver certificate?

Me: What?

Jim: A silver certificate.  When was the last time you came across one?

Me: What?

Jim: [insistent] C’mon Kari, you know, silver certificates they were like dollars, but redeemable for silver.

Me: Never.  No idea what you’re talking about.

Jim: Really?

Me: [blank stare]

Jim: This, look, see?  It says silver certificate across the top.

Me: It looks like a dollar.

Jim: It IS a dollar, but it’s also redeemable for silver, it says right here, look.

Me: How would a person ever know that?  It looks like a dollar.

Jim: It says right here [he says again, pointing, again, at the words Silver Certificate]. It’s the 1957 series. And look, the color of the seal is blue, and the writing here is different than on a standard federal reserve note.

Me: What’s a federal reserve note?

Jim: [gives me that raised eyebrow look]

Me: Where’d this come from?

Jim: Peter found it at the ball park.

Me: And he didn’t immediately spend it on candy?  Wait, how’d he know it was something special?

Jim: He looked at it.  He could see it was different.

Me: What? Peter?  It looks like a dollar.  It IS a dollar.  How come he didn’t spend it?!

Jim then starts to tell me how they came about, and how people would redeem them, and how there were a lot of them circulating when we were kids in the 60s.  He pulls out a real dollar (emphasis mine) and goes into great detail about the differences in design.  Which, I say, yes, I can do the comparison when they’re side by side.  I can see that that is blue and that is green.. yeah, yeah.. but who’d notice that?!

The conversation pretty much ended with that.