In-dent-edness

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I heard a story the other day about a very rich man. What happened to him? He left his family plenty of money to hire pall bearers for his funeral. The sudden turn of phrase takes me a second. I look up to meet the teller’s eyes. He winks gently before turning his gaze back to the story at hand.

A couple of days later I heard another one about a young woman on her way to becoming rich. The company she works for doesn’t sit well with her moral code, but, alas, she experienced financial scarcity growing up and will elbow her way out of that fate in any way she can. The person sitting across from her asks, “Is there an amount of money at which you’ll know you have enough?” “It’s hard to imagine the feeling of enough,” says the young woman on her way to becoming rich.

I know a man who grew up in the fifties. Sometimes his family stressed about food. Four kids to feed at the house. The parents didn’t get along so well, sometimes drank too much. When Father brought home a half-gallon of ice cream for the kids, they had a rule: whoever divided it into four bowls picked last. For fairness’ sake. One of the kids made it to college and then graduate school. He took a job as a teacher. One day—he can remember it clearly—he woke up and realized he was no longer working class. His sons wouldn’t have to divide the ice cream four ways, but they would inherit the story.

I heard another one about a French peasant who fell in the cow stall and hurt his knee.¹ This was during the lull between the wars. A week later he went to see a bone setter in the city. He paid the setter’s fee, then handed him a small pot of honey—from the bees back home. The city man protested the gift of honey. Afterwards, on the street, the peasant with the hurt knee heard a voice he recognized, clear as day. It was his son, just sixteen, who’d left the village for the city earlier that year. With a crowd gathered ‘round the boy, the father listened on. “Soap tablets, guaranteed to get out the toughest stains, on sale today for the low price of…” The father couldn’t stomach it. He hobbled on in disgust. Several days later, when his son Edouard returned home, Marcel let him know what he’d seen.

You were robbing people. It was an authoritative accusation.

It took out a lot of stains, Edouard smiled.

Monkey-work! Why don’t you practice your trade?

I like the outdoor life, I guess. He paused and then shouted at the top of his voice. I must have gotten that from you! You wouldn’t last a day in a factory!

The father shifted his legs, placing them wide apart, as if expecting to be jumped upon.

What you were doing in the market was a fraud!

No, I was selling.

It was a fraud!

It was selling!

In October Marcel and [his wife] Nicole lifted the last potatoes. By November the small apples on the trees had turned red. Marcel climbed up to shake them down whilst the cows were still grazing in the orchard. Nicole waited in the cropped grass and the apples fell onto the sheet she had spread out. Each evening Marcel took the mare and tipcart and brought another ten sacks of apples up to the house. Altogether there were sixty sacks: fifty filled with apples and ten with pears.

We took inventory of the season’s harvest here at the Farm yesterday. Dried peppers, corn and herbs, frozen basil and tomato, shelves of cured squashes, bags of beets, potatoes, rutabagas and carrots. Buckets of sauerkraut. Meat mostly still on the hoof. A living lamb or steer requires no freezer space—only hay and water.

At a Farm where nothing is for sale, all of these foods will spoil if not eaten or shared. That’s the odd thing about money. It whispers seductively to human scarcity in a way a butternut squash never will. If I sell you the extra from my garden, I avoid the risk of rot altogether. But I also avoid the risk of relationships—the risky business of trust.

If I share the extra from my garden with you, your capacity for memory becomes my savings account. I literally lay my life in your hands, and, by extension, in your mind and your heart. The act of passing the gift along can be imagined as a trust fall, or a human memory exercise. That’s another odd thing about money. It seems to breed forgetfulness—atrophy of the mind—and distrustfulness—atrophy of the heart.

Before mass industries sprang up, it was virtually unknown for a man to alter his material circumstance by his efforts alone. He couldn’t make money; it was granted him by a monarch or war lord, or it came in the form of booty, or was taken out of the earth or conquered territory. But the alchemists dream of creating wealth where there was none before, of conjuring it out of nothing, or out of something without known value, has only been realized in the last hundred years….It took the Krupps [Hitler’s main munitions manufacturers] eight generations, starting in the sixteenth century, to obtain great wealth. By comparison, Rockefeller did it in about forty years.²

Here at the Farm, we check the squash weekly for signs of rot. We cut them into pieces, roast them in a wood-fired oven, and convert them into soup. Short-term freezer storage makes weekly soup distribution logistics manageable, but the winter is only so long. There will be fresh food to harvest by June—such is the forgiveness of the greening land. Proximity to that seasonal ebb and flow makes it easier to store one’s good fortune in the belly of the neighbors.

There are a couple of funny things about grocery stores. They aren’t seasonal, for one. And they make it mighty hard to remember that there is a dent in the world the approximate size and shape of the squash that fits so neatly into a shopping cart. How are we supposed to experience goodwill without that dent? To remember that the neighbors are glad to have us around? That the earth dreams in the specific shape of humans? That we are welcome participants in a story much larger and older than the separate self and its wants?

Here’s the lonely promise on offer at the supermarket: your decision to eat butternut squash for supper tonight will leave no dent in the living earth or the human neighborhood—only in your bank account. Freedom from bodily belonging—from ‘in-dent-edness’—makes good consumers.

At a Farm where nothing is for sale, we ask people to carve a dent in their bank accounts the specific shape and size of the interactions we haven’t yet figured out how to de-monetize. We use money only where we haven’t yet found the courage to replace transaction with relationship.

Last week, I drove to the shop of a welder whose wife I got to know when she began attending some of the Farm’s events. The oven we use to roast the squash needs a custom-fabricated firing door. The white-haired welder, who I am meeting for the first time, agrees to cut a plate of steel to the specific shape and size needed. I know in my heart that my courageous move is to ask him to offer his services as a gift, but even after years of practice I still hesitate in certain situations. Humiliation entails, quite literally, bending down to kiss the ground of your bodily becoming. Atrophied worthiness muscles are slow to regain strength.

The welder asks me about the Farm. I tell him that we offer all of the food for no charge. I notice a change in the pattern of creases radiating outward from his eyes. A softening of his gaze.

“Maybe you could bring some food by,” he says to me. I know what he means.

“We don’t actually trade with the food,” I reply. “But there is money in the Farm account, and I will gladly write a check for any amount that you ask.”

After a pause, he says “This one will be on me. You are doing good work in the world.” I’m already imagining the box of food I’ll drop off at some point when he’s not expecting it. The gift stays alive by passing out of sight for a while before emerging in another form. Soil is more than a handy metaphor for human culture. It is the template.

This is when the white-haired welder tells me the story about the very rich man who left his family enough money to hire pall bearers for his funeral. The conversational sequence seems instructive. Once he’s caught my eyes and given me that wink, he continues. The very rich man was known for being ruthless in his business dealings. That’s how he made so much money.

Shortly before he died, the rich man stopped by the welder’s shop with a small job for which he would wait. The welder points to the large wood furnace in the corner. “He stood right there warming his back, bent a bit at the waist. At some point I looked up from my work and saw tears running down his cheeks.”

“My family all hates me,” the rich man said.

“You’re still breathing, which means you have time to start healing your relationships.”

That’s the story the white-haired welder thinks I should hear before heading on my way. “I will call you when I’ve got your door finished,” he says.

With care, Adam

1. John Berger, Pig Earth.

2. Thomas Wiseman, The Money Motive.