That'll be five packing peanuts, please . . .

In first grade, we were given packing peanuts as incentive for completing certain tasks. One styrofoam nut for being able to write the alphabet, two for being able to name all seven continents, and a few more to count and write the numbers up to 100. Every Friday, Ms. Crook would open up the Peanut Store, at which we could exchange our packing peanuts for goods. For 1 pp, you could get one of Ms. Crook's home-baked sugar cookies or a plastic spider ring. Five pp would get you a candy bar, a Dukes of Hazzard pencil, or a superball. And in exchange for a mere 10 pp, one could choose either a green or blue plastic motorcycle. I wanted that motorcycle.

There were other, more valuable goods to be had, but I was never much for saving and Ms. Crook made a mean sugar cookie.

There were only a few caveats. One, the Peanut Store was open on a first-come, first-serve basis. There was no layaway program and they didn't accept credit, so if you wanted something, you had to be the first to save enough to get it. Late-comers ended up with the Mounds bars or the Chunky with raisins. Your pp could also be confiscated at any time, say if you were caught cheating or stealing someone else's. And finally, partial packing peanuts were not accepted (Billy Tighe liked to chew on his - like I said, I preferred the sugar cookies).

The point of Ms. Crook's little incentive program was not only to get us to do our lessons, but was itself a lesson about money and exchange.

Ms. Crook was a genius.

Okay, so it took me several years to stop getting excited when the UPS man left a large, non-heavy box on the doorstep (two hundred and forty-seven packing peanuts! Imagine the Hershey bars I could get for that!). And the peanuts were hard to keep in a wallet.

But I thought back to that Peanut Store years later, in high school economics, when we learned about barter and monetary systems, about how 'currency' is really just what the people of any given society have deemed valuable. In come cultures, cattle are the thing of value. Or chickens. Or turquoise beads. For us, the mighty fine people of these United States, our thing of value isn't a thing at all - it's just digits. Points.

Whoa! you say. Hold on a minute! We have money, and that money says right on it "Federal Reserve Note" and there is theoretical gold and silver somewhere in some vault that guarantees that piece of paper. Our money is backed by the strength of the American economy!

(Excuse me while I laugh)

(Okay. I'm good now)

But really, how often do you even handle those pieces of paper anymore? I work full-time in an office, and the only compensation I've received for my time has come in the form of a few points being added to a bank account in my name. When it comes time to pay my bills, I go online and transfer a few points into another account at some cell phone company or utility provider. I even pay my rent this way. And when I go to the grocery store? I swipe a card, linked to my bank account, that deducts a couple of points from my account and puts a couple in theirs.

Most of our exchange is done this way. If we actually want cash, most of us go to a machine where we can purchase a few bills (for a small atm fee) by deducting points from the total number of points we have on record at a bank that may or may not have the actual cash to back up all the points all their members reportedly have.

So our barter system is one of points which represent paper currency that represents theoretical precious metal but really only represents the notion that it will continue to maintain its own value because of the "strength" of the American economy (Can anyone say 'Confederate bills'?).

I miss the packing peanuts.