A few days ago, I went to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Pho Saigon (which I still love even though a few pieces of tripe ended up in my bowl of vegetarian pho by accident!) When I got my change, I was excited to see that one of the dollar bills had www.wheresgeorge.com stamped on both sides. Matt had received a Where's George? dollar a couple of years ago, and was able to track its progress online. You just plug the serial number into the website, and you can see where the bill has traveled before it found its way to you. If you register, you can also continue to track the progress of the bill after it's made its way back into the economic stream of things. There was only one previous entry for my dollar--it had been in Omaha about a year and a half ago. I thought this was very cool, since I have origins in Omaha, as well. My mother's mother grew up there, raised by an aunt and uncle after her mother was sent to a TB sanitarium. My grandmother's sister was also raised by this aunt and uncle, but her brothers were sent to an orphanage; the aunt and uncle didn't think they could handle boys. The siblings met up again years later in Chicago.

Another Omaha connection--when my grandmother was a teenager, she worked as a cash girl in the Brandeis Department Store. When my mother met my father, my grandmother assumed he was part of the Omaha Brandeis family. He's not (he changed his last name to Brandeis from Bransky during the McCarthy era), but I love the synchronicity of our naming (and the synchronicity of this dollar bill that's taking me back to my roots. I'm eager to see where it will travel next!)