The Monday morning after Father’s Day I had a voicemail from Steve at a local industrial supply company. I haven’t done business with them in years so I was surprised and dreaded calling Steve back expecting they wanted us to make some sort of custom hardware. I didn’t want to have to tell him no.
Instead Steve said he’d been at a friend’s home and saw a stamped metal bee I had made. I had no recollection of this.
“Do you know Rich M*****?”
I know Rich. I realized what he was talking about, “you mean a coin?”
“Yeah,” he said “I’m a bee guy and I’d like to get one of those.”
At the beginning of pandemic lockdown when everyone’s schedule came to a grinding halt I took the opportunity to experiment with a project I had thought about for some time, making “coins.” One of the first coin dies I made was a bee. I made some small quantity of them, not for sale but for my own satisfaction.
A few months back we had met and done some work for Rich. He’s an older guy, old school. He treated us respectfully and we enjoyed working with him. I gave him a coin as a gift.
I told Steve that I didn’t know if I even had any more of them, but Jeannette found some.
“How much do you want for one?”
“I don’t know, I don’t sell them.” I looked at Jeannette, “fifty” she mouthed.
“Oh! That’s too much,” said Steve “I can’t afford that. Can you do less.”
This was when I should have hung up, but I didn’t, “I could maybe do forty,” I said, and immediately wondered why I was negotiating down. I wasn’t looking to sell a coin. I didn’t want Steve’s money. I was being polite.
“I’m 70 years old and I’m working for minimum wage,” Steve told me, “I thought it would be like 5 or 10 bucks.”
I ignored the insult. “You say you’re a bee guy?” We’ve kept bees on and off for a few decades and we generally like people who keep bees. “Do you keep a some hives?” I asked.
“Oh, no. I collect stuff with bees on it,” he said. “I can’t pay that much. I’ll work on Rich,” which I took to mean that he would try to manipulate Rich into giving him the gift I originally gave to Rich.
He had no apparent shame about his intent.
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My dad was not one to give advice or life lessons. But I remember a discussion once about the practice of haggling over price.
Dad was born in a small town near Kabul, Afghanistan in 1930. People traveling overseas often talk about how it is customary to haggle over price in markets or with vendors. Supposedly the natives expect you to haggle over price.
“No,” said my dad, “You either pay the workman’s price or don’t buy.” That’s all he said, but I understood what he meant. I don’t know if it was a personal philosophy or if it is cultural, but it speaks to value and worth, of a person’s work, craft, the value of their skill and labor, a person’s intrinsic dignity.
In Booneville, NY native J.W. Schultz’s memoir My Life as an Indian he recalled working at a trading post in Montana Territory in the 1860’s. He decried the encroachment of “civilization” with nickel and dime change replacing barter. It fundamentally altered relationships that previously sought to find roughly equal value in exchange to one of exactitude that deprived the exchange of a sense of consensus.
We have very old phrases based in barter, good deal, bad deal, fair deal, square deal. A square deal is one where both sides walk away content in the value of their side of the exchange. In a financial transaction value is more strictly defined.
Afghanistan is an old place existing at and before the intersection of the Vedas and the Avestas. It is a place trade prospered into pre-history. Lapis Lazuli mined in an extremely remote valley of Badakhshan, Afghanistan has been used by archaeologists to trace ancient trade routes that long predated what are commonly collectively known as the Silk Road. Lapis was a luxury good in Mesopotamia in very early times, even before the death of Egypt’s King Tutankhamen whose funeral mask features lapis inlaid in gold.
I started reading James Michener’s book Caravans the other night. A character talks about Afghanistan of the mid 1940’s as existing in the Bronze Age. That was roughly 110 years after British East India Company deserter Charles Masson had made his way to Kabul and began his search for one of Alexander the Great’s self-named cities in what is now Bagram on the Shomali plain outside of Kabul. Masson eventually collected an estimated 47,000 ancient coins as part of his early archaeological work. There aren’t many stories of greed that top that of the East India Company and Masson was robbed of nearly all of the coins, not by Afghans, but by the East India Company which even robbed him of the dignity of his work by preventing the publication of his scientific work. The Company took possession of Mason’s collection and much of it disappeared into private collections in England. Today about 7,000 of those coins are held by a museum in England.
It was never a secret that ancient cities, temples, stupas and such heavily dotted the landscape of Afghanistan. They existed for hundreds or even thousands of years many of them completely unmolested, some of them subject of regular repair by various shahs and khans. During the last 40 years of war many ancient sites were plundered. Looted. Sold on the antiquities markets of the West.
People talk about the culture of Afghanistan and the larger Middle East as being wracked with corruption. It seems odd to me that a place now maybe the poorest place on earth holds so little of the immense wealth it generated over the last 3,000 or 4,000 years.
Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire now entombed at his gardens in Kabul held the Koh-i-noor diamond in his hand somewhere around 1500 CE. Today it is among the Crown Jewels of Charles III in London. I suspect some guy named Steve worked on Babur’s descendants until he got the Koh-i-noor out of them.
I'd pay $50 for that -- in fact, I will, if you're willing to sell it. I think you should make more coins. They're cool