I want Warrior Mouse. As soon as I saw him in the window at Puchteca Indian Art I started putting the occasional extra five-dollar bill into a tea tin savings bank: For weeks I’ve walked San Francisco Street to the post office so I can admire the feather on his head and the white spots on his delicate but fierce mouse body. I make up stories about where he is going with his bow and mallet. Shaped with precision by Hopi carver Watson Namoki, he’s worth every nickel of the $180 price, and while I’ve long believed no art purchase need be logical, as soon as those fives began to accumulate I started seeing all around me what else that money might buy.
Five dollars will buy two bunches of daffodils on sale. That’s 20 stems of green; that’s a bright flock of yellow trumpets that might shout all week from your window sill, “the light is coming, the light is coming.”
Five dollars will buy a lot of potatoes in a bag or a couple of weeks’ worth of organic broccoli, and while it’s hard to find a glass of wine in a restaurant for five dollars you can entertain your palate with a whole bottle if you find those labels with the penguin or kangaroo on sale.
Within walking distance of Warrior Mouse you can go into a cooking store with seductive French-oven dishes the color of bright crayons, and while it would take a handful of bills to take one home, at least you could buy a two-inch, stainless steel Mesh Wonderball perfect for suspending your loose tea in hot water. Or you could get a simple wooden spoon. No one should be without a wooden spoon.
If you leave the cooking store with that $5 still in your pocket, you could go down the street to the outdoor gear store and buy a bright bandanna and 10 feet of neon 3mm nylon cord instead.
A new pair of socks, a couple of interesting pens, a pint of local brew with a nice tip for the bartender. A bowl of chili. Twenty magazines from the used book sale at the library. A standing liberty quarter, a buffalo-head nickel and a couple of other worn bits of history from the coin shop. Having Warrior Mouse on my shoulder causes me to notice the price of things in a new way.
I share rooms that cost the two of us $650 a month. That’s without utilities, so if I divide my half of the rent by 31 days this month, and if I don’t turn the heat on for a day and take no water from the spigot, five dollars buys me one morning’s residence.
Today in the wrinkled newspaper I read for free at the coffeehouse I consider Randy Wilson’s directions for skiing out in Kendrick Park and remember what a bargain it is to play in the national forest. Maybe I’ll make a pilgrimage out that way. Thirty years ago a bunch of us drove up from Phoenix and built two igloos out there somewhere. We spent the night and the candles we used inside gave the igloos a wonderful glow; they looked like neon snow cones from another planet landed in the woods. For years I’ve wanted to go there with a photo to see if I can sort out just where we were.
A mouse reminds me it is a 40-mile round trip with gas $2.72 a gallon last time I filled up. I do get 26 to 30 mpg with my well-tuned, 12-year-old four-cylinder truck. 1.5 gallons x $2.72 = $4.08. Five dollars buys me a half day’s outing with some change left over for that jar in the kitchen. That’s it then, I’ll go to the woods and examine the great white outline of the sacred mountain and maybe that’s the best way to come into possession of Warrior Mouse. While I’d like to have a wooden folklore figure on my desk to whisper stories to me when I’m without stories of my own, the lesson I feel wise to savor this winter is this: open your hand to savoring without possessing. Be—be content to just be—before buying.
