My Adventures as a Counterfeiter

This is a story about an orange Canadian banknote, one of a kind.

The summer I graduated high school I went looking for summer work at the then under-construction Mactaquac Dam in New Brunswick. Back in those days, of course, hitch-hiking was not only safe but normal, unless your Daddy was rich, which was not my situation.

So, after my Mum had packed me about twelve lunches and sent me on my way, I went off to find fame and fortune. Stuck out my thumb, and soon enough had a ride, then another, then another. Truckers, traveling salesmen, police officers– all of them friendly and great conversationalists. It was a wonderful lark. It’s a pity that this mode of travel is no longer safe for young adventurers.

Just to be prudent, I had taken a twenty-dollar bill (a serious sum of money in those days) and placed it carefully beneath the felt insole of my work boot.

As it turned out, Mactaquac was not hiring, especially someone “from away”, so after visiting my Down East friends, I made my way home. The irony was that I later found work in Saskatchewan, but that’s another story. Actually, several.

Fortune had smiled on me because I had not needed my underfoot money. But fortune also frowned upon me, because in the few weeks I had been on the road, mostly in the hot sun, the combination of orange felt insole and sweaty feet had irretrievably dyed the bill a kind of carrot orange. It was actually very close in colour to that of a two-dollar bill (which we used to have back in those olden days). Certainly not the moss-green of a traditional Canadian $20 banknote!

So when I got home, I had the problem of negotiating a very bogus-looking piece of paper. Not even good-looking bogus– it looked like the kind of counterfeit Miss Johnson’s kindergarten class might have produced.

I think I hit nearly every bank, trust company, and credit union branch in town, my panic increasing with each rejection. Usually, the response was something like, “Yeah, that’s a really good story, but no, we’re not falling for it.”

Finally, I encountered a teller who knew somebody who knew somebody who attended my church and was willing to make a few phone calls. After filling in paperwork by virtue of which they probably still own my soul, I was allowed to deposit the note to a brand-new savings account, with a thirty-day hold. Of course they wouldn’t give me cash. Would you?

For whatever reason, I was reminiscing about this long-ago adventure and wondered had happened to my orange twenty. Maybe it’s a museum piece somewhere, maybe it’s a prize in somebody’s collection, maybe it got used to light a cigar. Who knows?

But it got me thinking. The bill was real enough, it just upset people because it didn’t look like what they thought it should look like. Then I realized that I often do the same thing with people. Instead of getting to know more about them, I make a snap judgment based on externals– colour, dress, accent, hairstyle, BMI, IQ, whatever, without first taking the time to discover their authentic selves. In so doing I focus on externals while passing over the intrinsic value of the human being before me.

Growing up in a world of straight, white, anglophone Evangelicals, it took me many years and much soul-searching to learn to see the real people behind different colours, languages, orientations, and beliefs, people who didn’t look, sound, or think like me.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to my Sunday School teacher, who often reminded us, “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh upon the heart.”