"'It’s only money, you can’t take it with you.' What did that mean, anyway? I didn’t know; I didn’t care."

Larissa Kaye Batten (llbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.  

"It’s only money!" Lou belted out in his old man’s, Brooklyn accent. "You can’t take it with you!"

Lou, a grumpy, looney, 69-ish, Brooklyn-ite delivered the mail every afternoon throughout the offices of American Banker-Bond Buyer in New York City, which was situated on the 31^st floor of a skyscraper overlooking Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty.

"It’s only money!" Lou would bellow over and over as he passed out the mail. "You can’t take it with you!"

I sat behind a long desk of fellow copy editors, and Lou would pass by us all shouting out the good news: "It’s only money!"

He rarely changed his musings, and, even when he did, he inevitably returned to his most vital message. "You can’t take it with you!"

Lou, who often slept in a secret place in the office building instead of making his long way home to Coney Island where he could sit on his bench on the boardwalk and watch the water and world go by, could have had little money, if any, to speak of.

Reporters and copy editors alike rolled their eyes as Lou aimed his words at us, but we loved him all the same.

"Hey Lou, what’s up?" Chuck would say.

"Hey Lou, what’s going on?" Tom would ask.

Lou would grumpily interrupt his mail disbursement to toss a few words back and forth with his listeners. Then he would grumpily head back to his mail, and, of course, his message about money.

"It’s only money," he yelled. "You can’t take it with you!"

Who better than Lou, with his old clothes, his mussed up hair, his gait slowed by whatever war he’d been in, to tell the yuppy world about the meaninglessness of money in the long run.

Lou, a grumpy old flower, wandering through a garden of well-to-do, college educated, intellectually amused, Wall Street journalists, shouting out his words that never changed.

"It’s only money, you can’t take it with you!"

How many times did we all laugh at his words? How many times did I ignore his message? How many times did I set him aside as someone to laugh at, an old man who could be a little lewd with the guys, who wore nothing new, said nothing new, and repeated himself over and over in his seeming senility.

"It’s only money, you can’t take it with you." What did that mean, anyway? I didn’t know; I didn’t care. I just kept picking up my abundant paychecks, went shopping during lunch for unnecessary new clothes, and paid out a seeming fortune for Wall Street area lunches while Lou brought his lunch pail to work for his lunch break.

Lou had been at his mail job for a bunch of years, but Lou didn’t last there. Management called for an overhaul, and Management didn’t pay attention to the gifts Lou gave us. Lou became too slow and too crazy in the eyes of Management. Management had money to think about. Management needed things to move at a New York pace.

Never mind humanity. Never mind the heart. Never mind friendship. Never mind all the hours and days and months and years Lou had put into his work. Out with the old. In with the money. Lou was flat out fired, booted out the door, sent back to Brooklyn.

But his message never left me. Years later, my husband began to repeat a saying he had heard somewhere or other. "When you’re 80 years old and you look back at your life, what is going to matter?"

I added a few words of my own to the saying. "What is going to matter, a pile of green paper? A pile of money?"

At last, I understood. "It’s only money. You can’t take it with you."

When I look back at my life, will I remember how much money came in my paycheck, how many pairs of jeans decorated my closet, or what I gave back to the world in the name of my God?

It is only money. And I can’t take it with me.

But what I pray to take with me is a whole lot of love and a whole lot of grace.

Thank you Lou for your message.

Thank you God for your messengers.

Amen.

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