The other day I found a penny, or rather it found me.
It had been sitting there for a few days. Many people had passed it by but none had thought it worth their time to scoop it up.
Maybe out of pity for the cast-off, which over the course of our lifetimes has lost almost all of its value, I picked it up.
The penny was marked with the date it was minted, 1971.
Every coin has its story; few of them get told.
***
1971 — What a year that was! I quit my job as a pizza deliveryman for Cottage Inn Pizza in Ann Arbor and drove an old white Chevy van with "Ft. Myers, Fla." stenciled on the side all the way across America.
Exiting the freeway in San Francisco, we chugged up Fell Street, turned right onto Fillmore Street, and drove until just before Pine Street, arriving at our destination: the self-proclaimed world headquarters of Running Dog Inc., publisher of the forthcoming SunDance magazine.
The building was nestled into a space next to a blues club called Minnie’s Can-Do.
We were a very small start-up team and before we could publish this brand new magazine, we had to build out the office by sheet-rocking the walls, painting them, refinishing and shellacking the floor.
As a flourish of sorts, we sealed a penny into that newly shiny hardwood just before we finished preparing the space that would see an amazing menagerie of the famous (John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin, etc.) and the crazy (too many to list) and the talented (everybody) walk through its front door over the next two years.
The experience of helping produce that magazine helped shape my career, leading directly to Rolling Stone, the Center for Investigative Reporting and all the rest.
***
Many years later, when SunDance was already a distant memory, I happened to be back in what was by then known in real estate terms as the Upper Fillmore District. There were no blues clubs left in the area but plenty of fancy, chic shops. After a brief search, I located old number 1913 and stepped inside for the first time since our first magazine dream had died there three decades earlier.
The space was by then a boutique. I feigned interest in the women's clothes on the racks. What I was actually seeking was pretty vague — some wisp or ghost of a memory, nothing more than that. The sheetrock had long since been dismantled, the walls had been repainted many times, and the track lighting overhead was a major upgrade from our day. All the evidence of our time there seemed to have vanished.
But then, near the rear of the store, I spotted something that stopped me dead in my tracks. There was the penny we’d imbedded in the hardwood floor, still frozen in time with its date: 1971.
Every coin has a story; few of them get told.
This one’s did.
(I first published this last June.)
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