They Still Owe Me

There are several people out there who are in debt to me. I have no idea how to collect from them, but just for the record, here they are:

• In fourth grade, I lent a friend of mine a dime for a bottle of orange pop out of the pop machine down at the Co-op. (Which was sort of a gas station with some farm supplies.) Ten cents for a bottle of pop, and I haven't seen it out of him yet.
  
  
• There was another friend of mine in junior high who ended up owing me 37¢ (or maybe it was 57¢) from a game of penny-ante poker which several of us played one evening down in my basement. Last I heard, he was living in Indiana. Don't you know what they do to guys who welsh on gambling debts?!
  
  
• When I was a teaching assistant in the math department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a good 25 years ago, the TA at the desk right next to mine borrowed my copy of The PASCAL Report, which was a thin but dense book of interest to a computer geek like him. Nowadays, I learn, he is a senior researcher with the Microsoft Corporation, "in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie." And he still hasn't returned The PASCAL Report to me.

People think I don't remember. People think I don't have a memory like an elephant. People think I'll forget a dime from forty years ago. People think I won't turn up at their door one day, like a Cosmic Avenger, to take back what is mine.

Now, if only I could remember where I laid down my ballpoint pen ten minutes ago...