After Shabbat dinner one week, my father told my fiancé and I, and my sister and her fiancé, this story:
"Children, there's an old Jewish story, joke, whatever you call it. Like a saying. During the first year that you're married, every time you, you know, 'get to know each other' you know, 'personally', take a quarter and put it in a sack. Then every time you, you know, 'get to know each other' again after your first year, take one quarter out. It should last a lifetime."
He was pleased with himself for telling such a funny story, and then walked away from the table giggling. We heard him huffing and puffing and forcing out a couple from the other side of the house as we heard him struggling to return to the table. I thought he was completely out of breath, that is, until I saw him.
He arrived at the table with two not so big, but obviously very heavy bags of money. He gave one to Adina and Dave, and one to Lisa and myself.
"These are from your mother and I. We still have four more of these downstairs."
The table's alive with laughter.
After some discussion, and after the shock of my parents openly discussing their apparently incredibly productive sex life for the very first time, we learned that each bag held about one thousand dollars in quarters. The mere suggestion that there were four more bags just like it downstairs turned me green.
The very next day Lisa and I were near a bank, so we walked in to ask for ten-dollar quarter rolls. Lisa asks the teller for one hundred of them.
"Seriously?" said the teller.
"Seriously," Lisa responded.
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
"Really? One hundred of them? You're serious?"
"I'm serious. We got this huge sack of quarters as a silly, yet quite impressive engagement present. It's kinda' funny, I know."
"Ok then…"
Thinking everything was now underway and understood, from behind us Lisa and I heard, "Seriously?" The woman behind us in line couldn't believe our good fortune. She repeated, "Seriously? A whole sack of quarters?"
"Seriously," Lisa responded yet again, this time giving me a look that, at a mere glance, said to me 'is 'seriously' the only word people in this bank understand?'
The teller returns just in time to give us what we asked for and interrupt yet another 'seriously'-fueled conversation. Handing us the ten-dollar quarter roll papers, he looks at us with an odd expression of still lingering confusion, "Seriously?"
"We're serious," Lisa spoke up once more, "we're just lucky I guess."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
We get the rolls and move on.
