Paying with Coins

Sensing the power (and pleasure) of increments.

Hello there! This is My Pen in the Air: a newsletter from the desk of an unexpected novelist filled with inspired endeavors and monthly updates on the creative life. Every post is free for all readers, but should you wish to further support my work, you can do so for less than one mocha a month! // Join me here:

Ca-chink.

Ca-chink.

Ca-chink.

I dropped one quarter in after the other, waiting with held breath at the pause between each coin: a primal fear response ingrained in a kid who grew up in the era of vending machines, toll booths, and dashed dreams. The familiar uncertainty of perhaps, this time, jamming the chute and losing what precious money you have to your name.

The risk of wanting and working towards something you may never get.

Photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash

Just a couple of hours before, I’d been bored and angry in the car. Between shuttling and sitting, one can only preoccupy oneself for so long without the endless scroll. Already listening to an audiobook, I sketched my steering wheel¹, and when that failed to produce the hit of dopamine I was hunting for, I moved on to cleaning out my purse: a goldmine of stuck-in-place productivity, especially in seasons where life trends a bit towards chaos.

We keep the running list of appointments that need to be made, swimsuits and shorts that need to be bought to fit this summer, refunds that need requesting, and meals that need planning for the week. We find lost things, buy gifts for teachers (when I am also the teacher), and register for camps. We look up field assignments and camp schedules and tryout dates. We deal with the piles that build over months of neglect, lost forms that require signing and bills that need paying.

But we are also the mobile receptacle of gum wrappers, hair ties, lego pieces, discarded programs and brochures, rocks, countless pens, and half empty snack bags. It’s unsurprising, then, that a purse can get out of hand.

And the wallet? A receipt graveyard with patches of punch cards springing up in between twenties and ones like flowers. We still use cash (gasp!) for some things, and my change section was obscene, burdened with enough coinage to fill a few rolls from the bank branch we never visit anymore. I could barely zip the thing shut.

I’d been angry that weekend: at everything and everyone for seemingly nothing. At the rain for pouring and the cars for piling up, at the crumbs on the floor and the eggs for sticking to the pan, and don’t get me started on the empty toilet paper rolls in every bathroom.

Quite simply, it may have been hormones. Or, more complexly, it could have been a defense mechanism for the littering of emotions I’ve been having about the coming absence of routines and rhythms we’ve known the last few summers. Relief, sadness, fear, shame: all tokens of a season of transitions I’m not sure are the right ones. But when am I ever?

Or maybe it’s that May is and has always been a tender month, in the midst of busy, and nothing tries to come to my tenderness’ rescue quite like my rage. Which, when it has nowhere helpful to go, tends to bleed into everything else — especially my attitude.

Home from soccer with my slightly cleaner purse and wallet, I prepared to chop heads of iceberg lettuce for the taco kits our community group would make and deliver that evening. Naturally, when I went to grab the bags for portioning, only a cavernous box stared back at me, taunting, from the cabinet. The slam heard round the world.

My rage and I, we flew all of three minutes to the grocery store whose parking lot I sat in, quietly seething, for double that time before finally getting out of the car. I stormed, like a madwoman, past the produce and Mothers’ Day-palooza to the paper and plastics aisle to get what I needed and then beelined for the self-check.

The box scanned, I fought with the zipper of my bulging wallet for a solid twenty seconds. “Just let me pay for these stupid bags!” I grumbled, through gritted teeth, under my breath. When it, at last, obliged, I was struck with such a peculiar and powerful wave of calm and clarity; there wasn’t even a question.

I was going to pay all six dollars and thirty-five cents of my bill with change.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that. I couldn’t recall letting the weight of coins slip from my fingers, one after the other, to meet the demand. I couldn’t recollect, at first, the odd mixture of naive pride and possibility in this form of payment, but it came back to me in a flood of nostalgia and muscle memory.

Ca-chink.

Ca-chink.

Ca-chink.

My fear gave way, each time, to delight which grew in increments.

I felt practically giddy, fishing through the zippered section of my fire engine red wallet in our neighborhood grocery store on a Sunday morning. I didn’t have a care for the lines forming around and behind me; they’d get their turn soon enough. The final clink of the machine’s reception of each coin flooded me with relief, the dwindling balance on the screen declaring my success.

From quarters, I moved onto dimes and then nickels. $3.10… $1.65… $.35

In the end, I was overcome with such a sense of satisfaction I’d been sorely in need of, victor of a win I hadn’t known I’d been hoping for. What I also didn’t know, was that in paying with coins, I’d feel a lightness, not just in my wallet, but also in me.

Sometimes I feel plagued by desperation for vast swaths of time and internal resources to MAKE BIG SHIFTS in my work, our home, and in me. And when that time and those resources don’t appear to be there, my frustration douses everything with fuel fit to burst once the match is struck.

“I can’t get anything done,” the narrative plays in my subconscious. I want to write the big check, to swipe the card, and to have everything done and accounted for at once. But then the coins, the small bits of work and creation I could do but maybe don’t, they sit there, accumulating and taking up more space than they were meant to.

I want to not have to deal with increments, waiting and fearing, and wondering will this all add up? Will I get the books into the world? Will I fire on all cylinders with my body and mind? Will our home ever feel not just put together but kept, at least for the most part, that way?

Incremental work is just that: it’s work. It comes from somewhere and it goes where it must, if we let it. Like with coins, sometimes the machine does end up jammed and we’ve got to call for help, but only after standing there for a moment, hands up in frustration, maybe jiggling it a little. Sometimes before we pay the bill, we have to press the return button, the change coming back to us in a flood, before we start all over again, bit by bit, watching the work add up yet another time.

And what if we get to the end and there’s not enough?

And where do the coins come from in the first place?

The work of creating, by some miracle, puts coins back in the coffer even as they go out. But they have to go out. I’d say the same, too, for nourishing the body and mind with rest, fuel, and movement. And while I’m not always convinced of it in real time, what I invest in our home life, I can only hope and trust God is using in some way to resource me in ways I do not yet see.

Maybe the real gift is not what we get, in the end, but what happens to us in paying.

Ca-chink.

Ca-chink.

Ca-chink.

Let us not miss the joy of increments, of discovering and using up coins (be it literally, figuratively, or both), and of sensing the soft and definitive ca-chink of all of it adding up for your — and our — greater good.

Thank you for reading,

1. These are odd, delightful exercises taking place around here more often, these days. And though it sounds silly, it’s a perfect example — upon reflection — of the very idea in this essay. It seems fruitless and small, but these moments of making mean something and build up, I believe, over time.