Change You Can Count On

My first job (not counting my disastrous stint as a 15-year-old mother's helper) was at Rocky Point Amusement Park. There I sold tickets--ten cents each, eleven for a dollar--in the Upper Booth, right in front of the Wildcat. I learned to make change by counting up to the amount the customer had handed me. For example, if the total was $15.50, and the customer handed you a $20, you were supposed to make change by counting out loud, handing them $.50 and four ones, saying, "Fifteen fifty. That's sixteen (the $.50), seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty." It was important to make change correctly, because you started with a $20 cash drawer, and had to "prove the drawer" (balance it) at the end of your shift. Or you heard about it from John Ferla, park manager.

I needed to do it that way--counting up--because arithmetic was not my strong suit, and still isn't. Some people can do arithmetical calisthenics in their heads, subtracting or multiplying effortlessly. Not me. I need pencil and paper, or a nice simple method like counting up.

I wish people today would make change that way, but not for the reason you may think. This is not a complaint about how kids today can't make change. It's too bad that they can't, but since the cash register does the arithmetic for them, you can't blame them, really. But they give it back exactly the way it's displayed for them--dollars first, and then coins. Using the example I gave above, the display says $4.50, so they hand you four dollars and fifty cents all together, with the coins balanced precariously on top of the dollars.

As a customer, I like getting my coin change first, before my dollars, because I find it less awkward. They do it the other way, coins atop the dollars, and I'm constantly dropping my coin change on the ground at the Dunkin Donuts drive thru. Well, I was. Now I tell them how I want the change handed to me. They roll their eyes ("Another quirky customer--what we have to put up with!"), but I don't care. I've got my change without having to undo the seat belt, open the car door, grab what I can off the ground, and bang my head on the way up.

And that's change I can count on.

Sister Mary Grammaticus Explains the Apostrophe

OK, class, settle down and come to order. Today we will deal with the apostrophe.

What is this fascination people have with the apostrophe?

They slap it on, throw a dash of it in, sprinkle it on top, and drizzle it over the whole concoction as if it's a seasoning they think will bring out the flavor of what they've written.

As with any seasoning, its overuse merely confuses the palate and ruins the taste.

There are two common uses of the apostrophe: to connote possession and to indicate contraction. It is also used, but only occasionally, to signify a plural.

Here are examples:

Possession: Your brother's hat is on the table. The Democratic Party's candidate was successful in his campaign.
Exceptions: We don't use an apostrophe with yours, ours, theirs, or its. That hat is yours. These hats are ours. Those hats are theirs. This hat has lost its feather.
Common mistakes: Writing a plural as if it's a possessive. These hats' are ours. Our special today is hot dog's. If you write these or anything similar, you're confusing your reader. Are you telling us you have hot dogs, or are you telling us your hot dogs have something, but you've forgotten to say exactly what they have?

Contraction: You're. When you write this, you're shortening the phrase, "you are." They've. When you write this, you're shortening the phrase, "they have." It's. This is a shortening of "it is." Could've. This is a shortening of the phrase, "could have," as in the sentence: "I could've been a contender."
Common mistakes: Writing "your" when one means "you're." People will write, "Your driving me crazy." No, YOU'RE not. "Could of." Since "could've" is a contraction of "could have," what exactly is conveyed by "could of?" Nobody knows, as could, should, and would, followed by "of," means absolutely nothing in the English language.

If you are hopelessly confused by the rules governing the use of the apostrophe, please follow this general rule: when in doubt, don't use it. Please.

Class dismissed...for now.

The Arc of History Bends Toward Justice

My sister has quoted these words of Martin Luther King, Jr. to me a couple of times in the past few weeks. She said it again tonight as we talked long distance to wish each other a happy election day.

I was so intrigued by this unbelievably powerful statement that I looked up the source--well, after all, I am a librarian.

MLK spoke these words in a sermon delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 1968, less than a month before he was assassinated. The exact quote:

"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In the same sermon, countering the argument that African Americans should be patient and let things happen, let justice unfold in time, he says:

"Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right."

I cannot help but think of MLK tonight, this historic night that he foresaw and foretold in one of his last speeches, a twentieth century Moses crying out, "And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

Getting to the White House is not necessarily getting to the promised land. The promised land is equality and justice throughout the fabric of the land, in the interstices, the detailed handiwork of everyday life in America. But it certainly is a giant step.

When I think of the enormity of the stains on the soul of humankind: countless massacres, institutionalized slavery, the subjugation of the Irish and the Armenians, pogroms and the sickening horror of the Holocaust, death squads in El Salvador: these words, uttered by a prophet in the land of his oppression, fill me with hope tonight:

The arc of history bends toward justice.