Custodian of Things (What comes to us?)

I found a job I'd like, looking on the Non-Profit Job Site:
assistant manager of the gift shop at the MN History Center. (They carry books!--the full catalog of titles from MNHS Press. )

Sadly, it's only 10 hours/week ($19/hour).
Gives me hope, though that I can do that sort of thing when I "retire".
I will look more into that possibility for later... or sooner?

In the meantime, it's (probably) smart to stay in my new job and work it out. (It's not like I won't have issues with management most ANYWHERE I work. It's the nature of the beast--and of me, eh?)
My work with the kids has enough good in it to be satisfying and worthwhile. And at my age, the money matters.

Big Boss manages the thrift store on Monday mornings--yesterday he asked me my overview of my new job.
"I love the students but hate the institution," I said.

"A spiritual opportunity," he said.

Yes! A helpful reminder--my school job is Doing Magic by Stealth .

I. Things with History

It is funny to me how much I like things... especially old or handmade things--things with history. Books are things, after all. So is art.

I'm reading an excellent graphic memoir I picked up at the store yesterday:
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (Scribner, 2018), by Nora Krug.

Born into a German Christian family in 1977 (the year I graduated high school), Krug always felt guilty about the Holocaust. She learned her nation's history in school--this book is a record of how she finally looks into her own family history.

Like me--only two year ago my sister searched online and found our family's history of enslaving people to work on a tobacco farm...

Krug lives in the US but in Germany hunts for WWII stuff from flea markets and thrift stores--she calls herself a Memory Archivist.
She includes actual photos and also her drawings of photos––I love how she mix-and-matches.

II. My Response

Looking at that post about my enslaving ancestors, I see I never wrote anything about how I felt or what I did after I got that hard proof of what my mother always suspected.
When I learned that the family money came directly and indubiously from slavery*, I decided to give away all the money I'd inherited from my mother.

There wasn't that much money left.
My mother had inherited a lot from her mother ––
(traceable to that enslaving family, related by a distant cousin's marriage--it's a maze)––
but she'd spent most of it (like, ordering crap on QVC) in her last dozen years--the years she withdrew into isolation--something she could do because she had the money to retire early.

Unearned, ill-begotten wealth was part of her decline.
She called those years "my dwindlement".
In her self-isolation, my mother's mental health declined until she ended her own life.

We three kids inherited 18k each.

(I've inherited money from my father and some of his family too--Auntie Vi!-- but it all came from their honest work, and I don't feel burdened with that--they wanted to help me carry on, be well, and share it forward.
Thank you, dead relatives!)

I've always given money to people who ask--or even who don't. When I got proof of where it came from, I upped the amount.

At the thrift store, I was in the perfect position to give away money organically. I'd thought about finding an organization that managed reparations, but there were soooo many people right in front of me who needed money. It was more natural (and easy!) to share with them.

I didn't select people by their race, but simply by need--coworkers who were out of groceries, were facing eviction, needed new car tires, etc.
You could say, people God sent...

One of those people was BJ, friend of the store who lived across the alley. She was dying of lung cancer that spring my sister found our family history.
Honestly, I'd have given BJ some money anyway... but giving more felt like justice as well as friendship:
She had nothing, lived in public housing. . . 

I didn’t say anything about it to her—didn’t want it to sound like charity—it wasn’t! I was lucky to be a conduit to make her final months easier. Not just with money, but by mopping her floor--and most importantly, keeping her company. But money matters.

"This will come back to you," BJ said to me.

I rolled my eyes or something, and she added, "Wait and see."

I love that she said that.
I don't see it literally like she meant it, but anyone can see that what we do does "come back” to us.
How not? It shapes who we become--it is our history.

I wonder if this might be something I could work on in the printmaking class I'm taking... I want to do a little project...
I don't know... It's heavy. Not sure if I'm up for that in this form.
But maybe something illustrating THINGS....
_______________

*You could say wealth in the US often flows indirectly from slavery (and other injustices), but I have to say, it feels different to see proof with my family name on it. 

I don't know.
I read this helpful distinction a long time ago:
We are not personally "guilty" for history (things we didn't personally do), but we are "responsible"---called upon to respond to the forces that act upon us.
Respond how?
That's up to us to discover.