Stopping on a dime

There's an old joke about a fellow named Artie who breaks into a home and kills three people during a burglary. Ultimately, he finds only one dollar in the house. The police capture him, he's tried, and found guilty.
The headline the next day reads, "Artie Chokes Three for a Dollar."
Bad pun, but I have a headline of my own -- about my own dear husband: "John Almost Kills Wife for a Dime." And this one is true.
First, a little general background ...
For this, I typed two words -- spouse murders -- into the Google search engine on the Internet. I immediately found a site called "Most Recent US Spousal Murder Statistics." (I'm pleased to note I am not one.)
The data are from 1988 from the Bureau of Justice, which examined spousal murder statistics from the nation's 75 largest counties, which, at the time, accounted for half of the nation's murders.
First, about 66 percent of the husbands who killed their wives had been drinking. Twenty-two percent had been using drugs. (In my case, John had just had a diet Sam's Choice cola.)
Three percent of the murderous husbands used contract killers. (John attempted this one on his own.)
Penny pincher
Now, for background on John ...
John has this charming habit of finding lost pennies. Like a sweet, little Irish elf, he picks them up from parking lots and sidewalks, grassy knolls and fields. His face, blushed from bending down, lifts to the sun, a smile ablaze across it, and he says every time, "My lucky penny."
He stops there, because we know what he means. "Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long, you'll have good luck. Find a penny, let it lay, and you'll have bad luck, all the day."
He tucks the penny into a little rubber coin purse he has. He squeezes it, it opens its mouth, and he tucks the penny inside. How sweet. How endearing.
How cheap?
It had not even occurred to me until last weekend. Now, don't get me wrong. I have always known that John is thrifty. I am thrifty. Juggling finances for years so that one parent could remain at home with the children for the most part, has required us to be. This is good, no?
Speech subject
Our daughter, Hannah, in fact, wrote her original speech for Boardman's speech team last year based on our thriftiness. She called it, "Talking Trash," because we've been known to commandeer a "find" from a trash can or two ... like two pink hassocks, a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner, a box of comic books, golf clubs, a picnic table umbrella, and a cookie cooling rack.
More telling, perhaps, is that Hannah didn't know what Dr Pepper was until she was 16; she thought the brand was, "Dr. Ahhh."
But, back to John and the day of the near murder.
It was a beautiful Sunday as we road our bicycles along a side street across from the Wal-Mart in Boardman. I was on a "new" bike John had found at a garage sale and repaired for me. He was in front on his Trek. About a bike's length separated us.
I was enjoying the warm breeze and the sun on my face, when out of the corner of my eye, lying on the ground, I saw ... a dime.
You know the rest
Not a split second passed before I realized what was about to happen. Like the proverbial passage of one's life before one's eyes, where time passes slowly and everything makes sense in less time than it takes to bat an eyelash, I knew what would happen. And it did.
Suddenly John's bike stopped cold. I squeezed my brake handles, dipped my bike to the left, scrambled with my handlebar and skidded along the gravel road, stopping in time to bang into John and his bike.
And then, I said what I already knew for a fact, "For a doggone dime?!" Only, I didn't say "doggone." I said, like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story," the mother of all swear words. I said it, and I meant it. Then I ranted a bit, and rode off.
After a moment, I glanced back over my shoulder. John's bike was parked, and he was picking up the dime.
murphy@vindy.com