Money, Part 1

My seven-year-old is explaining to me that if she had a billion dollars, she’d be able to spend $100 everyday for a whole week. I tell her she’d be able to spend $100 everyday in a row for a lot longer than that, and thus begins our little discussion on how many days in a row she’d be able to spend $100 if she started out with first, say, $1000; then $10,000; and finally $100,000.

The thought of being able to spend $100 for a thousand days in a row overwhelms her. She doesn’t ask it, but I know what she’s thinking. How many My Little Pony sets is that? How many La-La-Loopsies!?

“And if I started with a million dollars? How many days in a row then?”

“Everyday in a row for about thirty years,” I say, hoping I’m close.

She closes her eyes, imagining, I suppose, $100 a day for the next thirty years: row upon row, in her mind’s eye, shelf upon shelf—eternal aisles of dolls and figurines and dress-ups; no clue, obviously, that even a family living on $36,500 a year, hardly millionaires, burns through a $100 a day, spread out over the course of 365 days, if they spend it all.

When her finite mind is worn out by the thought of what must seem to her like infinite, inexhaustible toy-purchasing power, she says to me, in a voice much too dreamy, much too voluptuous for a seven-year-old to ever, ever be using: “Oh, Dad. Kill me when I’m thirty.”

Does she want the money first, before I kill her? To spend every last hundred-dollar bill of it, heedlessly, recklessly, on crap?

Or perhaps she feels that she can’t live past thirty, not on her current income, not when the millionaires out there are living high on the hog, $100 a day, even on Sundays.  

To be honest, some days I wish someone had killed me when I turned thirty, but that’s a topic for another post.