My first real job was as a writer-editor at Rolling Stone in 1975. My salary was $16,000 a year. That was more than my Dad had earned in any year of his long career. It also was more than a rookie Major League Baseball player then earned. They got about $14,000 a year at that time.
Yes, times have changed. Baseball stars now make multiple millions each year, and the Boston Red Sox paid over $50 million this year simply to meet a top prospect before signing him. Then, they threw in another $50 million or so to get him on their roster.
Meanwhile, the per-word rate for freelance writers has hardly budged, and still hovers around $1 or less at many outlets. Editors are somewhat better compensated, but they don't get signing bonuses, long-term contracts or the super-lucrative product endorsement deals that elevate athletes from simply rich people into the super-rich.
But none of this was what went through my mind when I squinted out the number "1976" on that random penny. The most important thing about that year for me was that my first child was born on Memorial Day weekend. She was tiny, only a few ounces over five pounds, and emerged into this world as perfect as any baby I've ever seen.
Nurses and other parents gathered around her incubator to admire her beauty through the window (in that era, at UCSF, they displayed the newborns side by side so that fathers and other family and friends could see what their wives, sisters, mothers, lovers, or friends had produced.)
***
Every time I find a penny I scrutinize its minting date, and start wondering what story that coin could tell, if only it had a voice. How many human hands has it touched, and how widely has it traveled? Thirty-one years is a long time in the life of a coin. So much so that, in the case of this penny, it has almost completely lost its former sense of status.
Today, pennies are throwaways, literally. Most storekeepers don't bother giving you change in pennies -- they round the total up or down and discard pennies like meaningless recyclable tidbits into an ashtray or some similar vessel for customers to use at their will.
***
So today I missed the boys' soccer game so I could attend my daughter's game.
She grabbed my camera to photograph one her teammates, and friends.
Another of her friends eventually curled up in her father's chair to recover from the rigors of the game.
Afterwards, back home, I made the kids a tropical fruit salad, remembering lots of times and lots of places in the process.
My youngest athlete noticed the flecks of dust rising in the rays of today's sunlight, streaming through our windows. She chased them, raised her hands, and tried to capture them.
If only we could capture the dust of our pasts! All of our ancestors, as well as every other life form, whether extinct or ongoing, are represented there. My little girl knows none of this.
She only sees a spec rising on an invisible wind and tries to catch it in her hands, much like catching a falling star.
I don't know about you, but so far, I have not been able to do that...
-30-
1 comment:
Reading this made me think of that idea that we are made of stars, or of star stuff - particles that once cooked and swarmed with energy in some primordial cosmos event.
Trying to catch the mote of dust - it is great fun, doomed to fail perhaps, but the drive is there and the light seems to bring something tiny we would never notice to life. But if tiny particles can have grand histories, then may be there is more wisdom in the act than it may at first seem.
Are we trying to remember something about ourselves?
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