Currency

Acceptez-vous Visa?" "Oui, Madame. Bien sûr." What pleasant yet alarming words. WiU I never get used to spending with plastic? Many remarkable things I have come to take for granted: electricity , running water, my husband's ability to repair things in our old Oregon farmhouse. But worldwide credit that can be tapped in a foreign land is not one of them. "Acceptez-vousVisa?" was one of two most useful phrases discovered by my non-French-speaking students on a coUege trip abroad last year. The other was "Parlez-vous anglais?" Money and language. Always central to travel. And one of the first things my fifteen coUege students did each time we got off the train in any new city was to look for the money machine. They were so accustomed to the world ofcredit, they did not find it at aU remarkable that in London or Barcelona or Carcassone they could stumble down a medieval, cobbled street and find, embedded in a stone wall, a modern contraption that required only the insertion ofa brightly colored plastic card and the tapping of a few buttons to make it cough up local tender. My husband shows me a tiny medieval coin, remnant of a coUection he once kept. It has the image of a hand stamped on it. He teUs me it is from that part of Europe that later became Germany. In the Middle Ages such coins were produced by smaU principaUties or towns. Coins, like this one, were made of süver. I hold the coin in my hand. It is thin as paper, cunning and attractive, cracked a Utde on one edge. The metal is so thin, the imprint of the hand shows through on the wrong side, slightly marring the cross inside a rounded-off square which is the reverse design. I wonder what the 114 Barbara Drake115 hand meant. A sign of trust perhaps, like a handshake? The coin, he teUs me, is probably from HaUe, near Stuttgart. There was more than one HaUe, but this HaUe, situated on a river, was known as a salt town and had a big salt trade. A whole bunch ofUttle towns in Germany produced these hand coins, but HaUe produced the most. What a myriad ofassociations in this tiny coin. Money is always an agreement, of course. Even though early money was made of substances people considered having intrinsic worth, like gold or silver, it was stiU an agreement. Let's agree that so much gold is worth one ox. So much silver is worth this much salt. There was no way to break a cow into small change and it was much more convenient to carry little bits of metal than to stuffyour pockets with condiments. I can imagine that when paper money first appeared, about 300 years ago, it must have had a worthless feeUng compared to coins. What would those people have thought of today's plastic currency? My first trip to Europe was in 1962. I was 23 and had just completed a year ofgraduate school. My first husband and I lived in Eugene, Oregon, at the top of a rundown old house that was a warren of student apartments. We lived there free because my husband managed the apartment, coUecting rent and making small repairs, but even ifwe had been paying, it would have been cheap. Rents ranged from $20 a month for some ofthe smaUer rooms to $50 for a two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment. In the basement was an old sawdust-burning furnace that, on good days, heated the whole building. One night we arrived home to find the building fuU ofsmoke and firemen. The smoldering fire in the furnace had somehow burned back up into the hopper and sent smoke throughout the ancient heating vents. A panicky tenant had called the fire department. The fire chief took one look around and condemned the building on the spot. We could only continue to live there ifwe did not light the furnace. It was a mild spring. All of us student tenants stayed on, heatless. About a week before school was out, a workman knocked at our door. "I need to come...