I can’t help looking for meaning in tonight’s ‘mystery of a dollar bill’

By David McElroy · July 13, 2018

Humans like to find hidden meanings, even when there’s no meaning to be found. When odd things happen, there has to be an explanation. Right?

Tonight, I’m looking for meaning in a mysterious dollar bill that showed up on the windshield of my car a few minutes ago.

I had been writing at Chick-fil-A for a couple of hours and left about 9:30 p.m. As I started my car, I noticed there was something under one of my windshield wipers. I was dumbfounded to realize it was money.

I got out of the car and looked around. There were other cars all around me, but none of them had stray dollar bills. I asked a couple of people nearby if they had seen anyone near my car, but nobody had noticed anything.

And now I’m left trying to construct a narrative around the mystery of this wrinkled dollar bill.

Maybe somebody wanted to do some small, random good deed for someone. Maybe that’s the only meaning. Maybe someone had a spare dollar in his or her pocket and stuck it on a random car in a fit of good will toward random humans.

Or maybe it was a token of good will from someone who randomly met me tonight.

Anybody who is around me for longs knows that I have conservations with random strangers all the time. Tonight, I talked with a young mother who had a 7-week old baby who had been premature. The baby’s grandmother was also there and the three of us had a pleasant conversation about the baby and the experience of having a premie. They seemed pleased to have a stranger ooh and aah over their little man. I wished them a good evening after 10 minutes and that was all.

Shortly after — right as they were leaving — I ran out to my car to grab my camera for a sunset picture. (The sunset has nothing to do with this story, but I’ll put a copy at the end anyway.) As I got my camera, I spoke to them again and wished them a safe trip back to Atlanta, where they were from.

Then I went off across the street the get a decent angle of reflected light in the clouds.

Could those people have been responsible for the dollar bill on my car?

I realize I’m stretching, but I like a narrative that makes sense to me — at least in some way. The random good will explanation seems more likely, I suppose, but it’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever heard of. Of course, I’ve never heard of strangers sticking money on the car of someone they just met, either.

So I have no explanations that make sense. I guess I never will. And this bugs me.

Does it mean something? Am I supposed to understand a message which I’m overlooking? Is it random? Is it intentional? Or is there some “message from the Universe” I’m supposed to see in this? None of the explanations make sense.

I like stories. I like explanations. I like the endings of stories to make sense — unlike the typical French film, but that’s another issue. So I’m sitting here trying to see a pattern or meaning or explanation, but I’m not finding one.

In a way, this reminds me of a mysterious note that someone left on my car last year, but this one makes even less sense. At least that note was in English, even if its intention wasn’t clear.

Apophenia is the word for the human tendency to look for patterns in meaningless random data. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe there’s no meaning. Maybe I should just pocket my free dollar and happily move on.

But something in me wants meaning and an explanation. It doesn’t appear I’m going to find one tonight.

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I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

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