Money

A friend of mine who has worked in money all his professional life (there are more formal names for his career, but basically, it’s money) has managed to retain his values and his good humor during years of what I assume is grinding monotony spiced frequently with greed. Curious to know how he has maintained his sunny attitude, I asked him what his first memory of money was. It’s a piggy bank, or, more accurately a doggy bank.

His parents gave him the bank when he was small. Unlike the piggies, the doggy had compartments for pennies, nickels and dimes (maybe even quarters) and so he learned to handle his small change, dividing it into denominations. The coins came to have character and feel for him, which perhaps later he was able to translate into the character and feel of bills. And so it seems to me his affinity for money was based on its actual feel—its reality in a world of tangible objects rather than in a world of abstracts.

I can’t remember when I first handled money and it seems to me now that it has never been anything but an abstraction for me, forwarded by the fact of checks and credit cards that keep us one or two removes from the thing itself—and using money to order online makes it even more ghostly. Maybe this is one reason it’s always been so easy for me to give money away, although the worthier reason is that I deeply believe that from those to whom much is given, much is expected in return. Can there be any other, even partial justification for inherited money, which always comes from polluted sources, including the mistreatment of women?

One thing I’m sure of: I was never given a piggy bank in the form of a dog or any other animal. I doubt if it’s even possible to find a piggy bank to buy today, although the monster with the name that begins with A can probably produce some, made in China. I do have a dim memory of one of my sons becoming frustrated with the way a china bank swallowed his allowance without revealing how he could get it out again in order to spend it; he finally smashed the bank, which seemed to me a reasonable thing to do.

Now we have banks, trust funds, financial advisors and accountants—all of whom function like that unopenable piggies, although with fees. We are a long way from the feel and the look of coins and bills; we are being moved rapidly toward an economy which will operate only with various forms of credit.

As I talk to groups about giving, I want to begin to bring the reality of money, its look and feel, back into my own consciousness. Think what it would mean if we had to dole out our payments in “real” money and tote it in sacks to the corporations that have billed us! We might find ourselves questioning some of the charges we accept every day because paying has become so automatic.

I hope some of my attentive readers will send me their piggy bank stories. Maybe they even exist today.

In Philanthropy