Pennies

I found a penny the other day, or rather it found me.

It had been sitting in exactly the same place for many days; not even the recyclers who pass through this neighborhood much like the kochi nomads in Central Asia, thought it worth their time to stoop and scoop it up.

Maybe out of pity for this cast-off coin, which over the course of my lifetime has lost almost all of its value and most definitely all of its self-respect, I bent to pick it up.

More likely, it was out of respect for my long-dead maternal grandfather, Alexander Anderson, who seemed to value one of my attributes as a little boy only, and that was my uncanny ability to find lost things, especially money.

He urged me to keep an eye out for pennies and to save every one I found, so I did. Over the years, I amassed quite a collection, the residues of which now reside in a paper bag under my bed. The collection grew so heavy at one point it cracked the glass vase I had been using to house it, thinking it might make a pretty display of some sort, you know, on top of the fireplace or maybe the piano.

But neither of my wives agreed to this particular form of artistic display.

So, the collection has always been stuck away in corners, closets, under beds, where it occasionally grows still, long after I stopped following my grandfather's edict. Like everyone else, I pass these little copper coins by; I toss them in ashtrays at corner stores to serve as someone else's change, etc.

My first three kids grew up in an era when pennies did not exactly matter but could be poured into paper holders and then turned in at the bank for something that, to them, felt like real money. Thus, on many a rainy weekend, they packaged up $10 or $25 worth of pennies, learning their counting skills in the process, and when we went to the bank to reap their rewards, they came away with enough currency to buy a toy or a book or whatever it was they wanted at that moment in time.

Even with all of these withdrawals, the collection persisted to grow, mostly because more often than not until the past decade or so, I would scoop up cast-off pennies and take them home, like orphans welcomed into a foster home. Who knows how many pennies we now have here, but 10,000 seems like a reasonable guess.

In other words, one hundred dollars.

***

The penny I saved the other day was marked, as all coins are, with the date it was minted. In this case, 1971.

What a year that was! I quit my job as a pizza deliveryman for Cottage Inn Pizza in Ann Arbor; my wife quit hers as a waitress in said establishment, and we drove our old white Chevy van with "Ft. Myers, Fla." stenciled on the side, all the way across America, until we were chugging up Fell Street, turning right on Fillmore Street, until just before Pine Street, we arrived at the world headquarters of Running Dog, Inc., publisher of SunDance magazine.

Before we could publish this new magazine, we had to build out the office, and we did so, sheet-rocking walls, painting the space, refinishing and shellacking the floor. As a flourish of sorts, we sealed a penny into that newly shiny floor just before we finished preparing the space that would see an amazing menagerie of the famous and the crazy walk through its front door over the coming two years.

Many years later, when SunDance was a distant memory, I happened to be in what was by then known as the "Upper Fillmore," and I stepped into #1913 for the first time since our magazine dream had died, decades earlier.

The space was by then a boutique, I think. I feigned interest in the women's clothes on the racks, but what I was actually seeking was the sweet spot in that floor, set long ago. The sheetrock walls had long since been dismantled, the walls repainted many times, the track lighting overhead much cooler than in our day, for sure.

When I spotted it, I stopped dead in my tracks. There it was -- the penny, still imbedded in the hardwood floor. Its date: 1971.

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