// The Credit Card //
For two years, 2012 and 2013, David, in middle school at the time, played flag football within the Friday Night Lights program in Huntington Beach. The first year, the “Boilermakers” won the championship for their age. He was in love with the sport, with the spirit of the game, the team and took it extremely seriously. The second year, although they did not win, he still loved it and was involved with all his might. While my husband, Daniel, also took this seriously, I could not get myself to understand the game. Not flag football, not regular football. To this day, I simply cannot read the action on the field. Yet, I attended all of David’s games, chatting with the other moms on the sidelines and cheering for David’s team whenever the rest of the moms cheered.
One Friday night in the fall of 2013, on the Marina High School fields divided into countless smaller fields, I was on the sidelines of David’s field with the other moms. Since Daniel likes to watch on his own, always nervous and not being able to focus on the game when there is chatting around him, he was standing alone on the opposite side. David and his teammates were warming up on the field. Suddenly, the coach and a few other dads rushed over to David. He seemed to have fallen and was holding his face in the nose area. The men brought him over to me.
“Do you have a credit card?” one of the dads asked me.
My mind started to roll like a film: A credit card? Was David injured and we needed to get a doctor? Would we have to pay the ambulance on the spot? Never mind that my son was in pain and holding his nose…
But I did not have a credit card with me. In fact, I did not have one at all. I had been in the U.S. for five years but had no credit card.
Till that moment, I did not think I needed one and never brought it up to my American husband. When I left Romania in 2008, credit cards were emerging, but not a widespread form of payment. Even debit cards were still conspicuous to employees who would line up at the ATM on pay day to withdraw most, if not all their pay, for fear it would disappear from the bank. The rectangular piece of plastic did not offer any guarantee that they got, in fact, paid. When I started working in 1998, I was paid banknotes in an envelope. It was around 2003 that my company introduced the direct deposit for the employees, on debit card. I remember a presentation by a bank employee at our company on credit cards. We left shrugging our shoulders. So, when I moved to the United States in 2008, not knowing what a credit does or is good for, I did not see the relevance of getting one.
“A bee stung David near his nostril,” one dad explained. “We need a credit card.”
I still was not able to follow the logic.
“How is a credit card going to help David?” I thought. “What do we have to pay for?”
I was embarrassed to tell them that I did not have one at all and was about to ask whether a debit card would do for whatever purpose it would serve, when one dad said:
“You scrape the stinger with the card, and it comes out.”
My eyes widened in amazement at the reasoning, and I was glad that I did not follow through in the confusion and admit that I was not a credit card holder.
I looked at David who was tilting his head to the back, his nose lifted towards the sky. I leaned over him, and in the dim light of the field, I put my thumb and index fingernails around the stinger and pulled it out.
“Is this the stinger?” I asked, holding it up in front of the dads who, in the meantime, had made a circle around us. David ran his finger by the area where the stinger had been only seconds before, and with a look of relief on his face he said it was gone.
I was relieved, too. A double victory: I had removed the stinger and saved my son from pain, and I did not have to reveal my lack of ownership over a credit card. Moreover, I performed the operation in a different way than had been suggested: scraping the area with a credit card.
Neither Daniel nor I can remember why I did not have a credit card for five years. But sometime in the following spring, I applied for and received one, and have been using it responsibly since.
