MONEY
Flummoxed by Money
The day before my mother, my sisters and I were due to leave Montreal and fly out to London to spend the summer with our grandmother, our cleaning lady, a Polish woman who had escaped the Nazi’s and whose knees were completely flat from years of scrubbing floors, handed me a dollar and said, “For your trip.” This was a woman who saved the forgotten breakfast crusts of bread, hung up all our clothes on one single hanger, and splashed around the bathroom so much bleach that the first to pee after she left had burning thighs for the rest of the day. So even at the age of seven, I knew this dollar meant something.
Bad With Money
I am weird about money. When I read a menu, I look at the prices before the food. When I enter a store, I go straight to the sales rack. I think everything costs too much. In conversation, I have to make an effort to shut up about what things cost because even I can hear how crass I sound. When I first started reading novels, I devoured Jane Austen because her books were always, at their heart, about money. She would tell you exactly how many pounds someone had a year and how that would affect their prospects in life and that seemed like a sensible way to view the world. Except, of course, in my case. As the daughter of a poor man, my life would have been bleak.
Loose Change
Here I am, age six or seven, finding a small thick disk of metal in the scrabbly earth of our yard in Seoul. It is bigger and chunkier than any coin I have seen, and heavier. I dig in the dirt with a stick. I find more dark slabby disks. I dig day after day, in secret, and the treasure accumulates. I put the coins in a secret place. The excitement of finding something ancient and precious forms a kind of vibrant pressure in my chest. The dirt where I find the disks is otherwise barren and dead-seeming. I feel the story of the treasure more than I invent it. I have a shadowy sense of long-ago human shapes, a hiding process. Hiding and finding: I am completing a circle with some past person. I play with the coins and in turn I too keep them hidden.