Three Dollar Umbreller

When you move to New York, you either learn things, survive, and thrive, or you learn squat and move back to the Midwest which, frankly, is where you belong (Can ya dig it? I knew thatcha could. See ya, sucker).

When I moved to New York City in January 1988 (arriving the week after Christmas with two suitcases and $100 – do kids still do that or am I hopelessly old?), one of the first things I learned was that a hot dog and a Coke cost $1. For my first six months in New York, my lunch consisted of a hot dog and a Coke (I was also too poor and, I admit, scared, to ride the subway every day – a whopping $1 each way – so I walked everywhere I could. I was reallllly thin). A hot dog and a coke now costs something like three bucks, only now it’s my lunch of last resort (no time to get anything else, forgot to bring my lunch from home, no cash on hand except a few wadded singles and I don’t feel like going to a cash machine, my hangover may kill me… You get the picture).

Pretty much the second thing I learned was that when it rains, you don’t have to worry about getting soaked, because in every deli, on every corner, and in every subway station, you can buy a three-dollar umbrella.

The three-dollar umbrella is such a New York THING that we don’t loan three-dollar umbrellas to people, we simply give them away.

“I have to run out. Do you have an umbrella I can borrow?”
“Sure thing, here you go.”
“Thanks, I’ll return this later.”
“Fuhgeddabout it. It’s a three dollar umbrella!”

The reason we are so promiscuous in our umbrella favors is this: Ask any New Yorker you know to look under their desk and count their three-dollar umbrellas. Everyone has at least two, sometimes more, of these flimsy things. They’re like mushrooms. You buy one on the way out of the subway, walk to your office, and throw it under your desk in a sopping pile, and two weeks later when you need it again, you find that suddenly you have three or four of the damn things. So you can be generous with your three-dollar umbrellas. Hell, maybe there are a finite amount of three-dollar umbrellas in the world, and they are merely circulating amongst us in New York.

This of course excludes the ones you see stuffed into litter baskets on the street corner, mangled like dead spiders and jammed down into the Starbucks cups and white plastic bags. You can almost feel the annoyance of the person who stuffed that umbrella into that mesh basket. You know that umbrella blew inside-out a couple of times before the nylon separated from one of the spokes (is that what they’re called?), and that guy (in my mind, it’s always a guy) crammed it into the wastecan in a fury.

I take a strange comfort in knowing that the umbrella that cost three dollars in 1988 still costs three dollars in 2009. The three-dollar umbrella appears to be completely inflation-proof. Is there another product you can name that costs the same now that it did 20 years ago? I didn’t think so. Even a slice doesn’t cost a dollar anymore.

Long live the three-dollar umbreller!

Oh, and to you men who splurge on the ten-dollar golf umbrellas? Well, you’re just sidewalk-hogging douchebags, and everyone knows it. From everyone whom you have ever poked in the head, fongool.

(Completely unrelated regional note: Where I come from, “umbrella” is pronounced “UM-brella,” and sometimes we call them “bumbershoots.”)