What's a couple of million dollars here and there?

You probably saw the same story I read a few days ago, the one about the techie guru billionaire who bought a guitar once belonging to the late Grateful Dead great, Jerry Garcia. Brian Halligan paid nearly $2 million for the iconic instrument.

Wait a minute. It's a guitar.

You could buy a brand-new guitar, one that's still under warranty, for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Which would leave you almost $2 million better off, not the other way around.

In this age of Internet-related riches, a billion dollars is fairly common -- not that any such windfall has reached my bank account. I use the Internet every day, only seems fair I should get something in return other than cookies I can't eat, cookies that demonstrate just how pushy online advertisers can be.

$2 million.

It's hard for someone like me to grasp that much money in one spot at one time, someone who remembers when my wife got her first teaching contract for just over $6,000 a year, and the publisher of the tiny weekly newspaper where I was employed told me that if I kept my nose to the grindstone I could one day make as much as my wife -- which sounded nearly impossible, because I was being paid the minimum wage: $1 an hour. $40 a week. Just over $2,000 a year. Why, I'd be an old man -- maybe 40 or 50 -- by the time I could expect such a royal sum in my paycheck.

So, yes, it's hard for me to fathom the outlay of nearly $2 million for a used guitar, even if it was used by Jerry Garcia.

While Skyping with our younger son Sunday, I said I couldn't imagine spending $2 million for anything, because there was nothing I wanted, or certainly nothing I needed, that would cost that much money.

Really. I racked my brain trying to think of something. There's not a car for sale anywhere I would want that costs that much, even though I would be willing to shell out a few thousand dollars for a 1967 two-door Volvo 122S sedan like the first new car my wife and I ever owned, the car we drove for almost a dozen years while we moved seven times around the country, the car that brought home both sons after they were born, one in New York and the other in Missouri, the one that took us places no respectable family automobile should have gone, the one that took us safely home from the lakeside campsite in northern Idaho after our 2-year-old son became hysterical in a borrowed pop-up tent that had to be unpopped so we could cram it in the trunk of our trusty 1967 two-door Volvo 122S sedan and, on the dirt road back to the highway, so we could confront a bristling porcupine that wouldn't budge. Not an inch.

And I'd still have approximately $1,987,214 left.

Not only that, I can tell you right now I don't want somebody else's old guitar.

While we were visiting -- online, of course -- our son mentioned a few things I might want that cost upwards of $2 million.

See. That's why we have children. They are smarter and much more creative when it comes to wishing for the moon.

"How about an oceanfront house in Yachats?" our son suggested.

Yachats is the tiny village on the Oregon coast that has been special to us since 1972, when we first spent a brief vacation there. We have returned over and over again. We rented the same oceanfront house for nearly 30 years.

A house in Yachats? Yes, by golly, I'd spend the $2 million that some of the houses there are fetching these days.

"And what about chartering a plane to get there?" younger son mused. "Or even a charter plane to go around the world," my wife chimed in.

See how $2 million so quickly affects your mind? Walk past any $2 million pit of quicksand, and you will surely jump in.

By the way, chartering a plane from Cape Girardeau to the airport at Newport, a few miles up the coast from Yachats, would set us back $55,000. I know. I checked, after seeing an ad in the New Yorker that said jet chartering was an economical way to enjoy a high level of luxury, and so I asked, simply: How much?

$55,000, came the answer. The charter company wanted to know: What is your departure date?

Sorry. Spending $55,000 on a round-trip flight to the Oregon coast is as remote an idea as spending $2 million for an old guitar.

Although, if I ignored the guitar and just spent some of my $2 million on chartering a jet, I'd still have $1,945,000 in the bank.

Which is more than Brian Halligan can say.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.