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good,” Mom said, trying to entice me.
    “I hate liver.”
    Now her tone was stern. “You want to go on a vacation? Eat the liver.”
    “What’s so great about Bermuda anyway?” I pouted, picking the bacon off the offending organ meat.
    “Don’t know,” Mom said. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
    The couple of dollars she saved by buying liver instead of ground beef—every Tuesday and Thursday night—went right into the coffee can, as did our movie money. Before the TV broke, I had to be content with watching giant rats swarm a model of a cabin in
The Food of the Gods
on Channel 7’s
4:30
Movie
instead of joining my friends for the latest
Planet of the Apes
installment. For her part, Mom took the bus and the subway to work instead of treating herself to a cab in bad weather. Every dollar, quarter, dime, and my penny collection went into that coffee can.
    By fall of the following year, we had enough money for our Bermuda vacation, and off we went on our big trip—not only my first plane ride, but Mom’s as well. We were so excited, and every bit of scrimping and saving we’d done seemed to be worth it. We even had a little extra left over since the plane tickets and hotel had been cheaper than Mom had expected. Nobody mentioned that rates to tropical locations usually
are
lower during the hurricane season.
    We were trapped in the hotel room with no television but plenty of entertainment in the form of gale-force winds knocking down palm trees outside, along with some hail. Not that we saw any of this—metal storm shutters were sealed tight behind the tropical flower-print curtains. We sat in that tiny space reading, rereading, and re-rereading the local newspaperthat had been left before deliveries were halted due to the weather.
    After three days we’d had enough, and the skies were clear enough for us to fly home. The only things I remember from that trip are how sweet the Bermuda butter tasted, and that Mom and I laughed until we were gasping when she said, “We ate all that stinking liver … for
this
?”
    • • •
    NOVEMBER 2008
    HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
    I don’t have an empty coffee can because the one in the fridge is still half full, and I’m making that coffee last as long as possible. But Nathan has a can covered with vintage soda ads that’s about the right size, and it makes the same satisfying metallic
clunk!
when a coin hits the bottom.
    “What’s that for?” Nathan asks when he hears the
clunk!
one morning.
    I tell him about how we’d used the coffee can to save for the trip, and then again to put money away to get anew TV set. “A black-and-white Motorola,” I say proudly as I put our new can on top of the fridge. “Mom got the floor model at a discount. The thing was huge, and when we got it home she carried it up three flights of stairs herself because she didn’t have enough to tip the cab driver to do it.”
    “Don’t you think our extra money would be better off in a bank?” Nathan asks.
    “Which one: a bank that’s been seized, or maybe one of the banks that’s being bailed out?”
    “Point taken,” he says. “Well, we have a TV, and I’m guessing you don’t want to go back to Bermuda. So what are you saving up for?”
    “I don’t know … I hadn’t thought about it yet. Maybe a bottle of perfume, or a romantic dinner at a nice restaurant for us. By the time I have enough, we’ll figure it out.”
    I know that Nathan is right; any spare money we have would be better off collecting interest in a bank. But as the days go by, the financial news continues to get worse, and logic be damned—there is something very reassuring about the simplicity of tucking away a dollar here or a nickel there in that can. Mom and I would cheer every time we heard that
clunk!
Today,it just sounds so much better than the yawning, empty silence of my retirement plan.
    A few weeks later, Nathan presses sixty dollars into my hand—a tip from a client he did