Lucky Money

Last Friday, I went to see my grandmother. Growing up I didn't find it funny that our name for her, Popo, was pronounced how some people say dad or grandfather.

Even though her hair was wispy and mostly gone and her speech was much more slurred, she still made an effort to greet me and hold out a strikingly red paper envelope with one shaking hand. I knew there would be money inside. Growing up, it had contained a single dollar with the suggestion that I buy “chew-gum” with it. Sometime as I got older, the envelopes upgraded to twenty dollars. I don't remember a graduation. Just one, then the other.

Today there was a hundred dollars in it.

I had told her repeatedly that I didn't need to be paid to visit my grandmother. Due to distance, I was the only grandchild that was able to visit with any amount of regularity. My aunts and uncles always urged me to take it, that it was a gift.

The money is long gone now, but I keep the envelope in my wallet as a reminder that maybe it wasn't the money that was lucky.