From the Editor’s Desk

There is a booth at the far end of every airport I have ever flown through, past the last gate and before the doors, with two numbers on a board above it. One is what they give you. One is what they want. The numbers are never the same, and nobody behind the glass has ever once explained the difference, because the difference is the business. You hand across money that works where you’ve been and get back money that works where you’re going, and you walk out a little lighter than arithmetic says you should be, and you don’t argue, because the board was posted before you got there and the plane is leaving either way.

I have stood at that booth with a handful of coins from a country I will never go back to and been told, politely, that coins are not accepted. Paper only. The coins are still in a drawer. They are money in the sense that a photograph is a person.

That’s the issue this week. Three changers, three boards, and the one thing they have in common, which is that somebody has to write the number and stand behind it. In a market town in Germany in the autumn of 1923, a widow chalks the mark’s rate at noon and again at four, and the four o’clock number has started to frighten her. In Budapest in the summer of 1946, a bank clerk with no bank left prices the eggs every morning and writes the true rate on a slate, and a young man from the economic police comes down the row with a newspaper. And in Reno in 1986, the MGM Grand becomes Bally’s, and every chip in the building gets ninety days to come home to the cage, one to one, no exceptions, while a man with a cigar box and a folding stool sets his own rate four feet from the window. Read them, and then pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The Porter — the point of view belongs to someone who carries or serves, and owns nothing on sale.)

— The Editor