Money

Hey man, can you spare some change?

I want to listen to rock & roll my whole life

Hey man, I’m so high I can barely walk,

Pappo is playing tonight, I can’t miss his show.

Charly García

“With these I can buy a Coke” he said as he piled up some coins in his hands. “With these, I can buy a sandwich too…” and he put aside two more coins, “…or Central’s flag!” “In a while, I would have enough money to buy a motorcycle, no, better yet, that truck, that 4x4, the one over there… wooow,… that one, it’s awesome!!!” “My mom is missing some teeth; with these coins I’m sure she will be able to get some new ones.” As he ran out of coins, he took some from the first pile and made a new one. “Yesterday, I saw those orange snickers with a green stripe. They were so cool! Tomorrow I’m gonna buy them.”The traffic light turned red. The cars stopped by his side. While his older brother stood in the middle of the zebra crossing and juggled three old dirty tennis balls, he – who couldn’t be more than 8 years old – was completely unaware of the rest of the world and kept switching the coins from one pile to the other without even knowing how to count them, without understanding what those lines on the coins represented, without thinking of their value, completely ignoring what “quantitative” means… rating everything according to his needs, according his own measure… and we all know how the world looked like when we were only 8.