A Penny Saved

The inherent value of a penny is nonexistent. It once was worth something, but now people seem to be more likely to drop it because of inconvenience than keep it around and save it up. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” Ben Franklin is famous for saying. But it takes so long for those pennies to add up. You take a penny and it sits around for months before it has enough peers to be worth even a little bit. One hundred pennies for one dollar. One dollar is almost valueless at this point.

I feel bad for the penny; it just doesn’t seem fair that people are so quick to drop it. The nickel isn’t worth much more, but that’s not so easily dismissed. Maybe it’s because the penny stands out. Copper versus silver. I don’t know.

 I remember one day I was sitting on a bench waiting for someone; at this point I don’t even recall who. I saw a penny out of the corner of my eye; the sun was hitting it just right to make it glitter. I’ve never seen a shiny penny before— they’re always grimy. I think that’s why I couldn’t take my eye off of it. I kept trying to go back to the notes, but that reflection from the light kept distracting me. I was reminded of the rhyme that kids would always say when I was little, “Find a penny, pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck.” I stood up, walked over to the penny and picked it up off of the sidewalk. It was on tails. Was that bad luck? I tried to remember back to recess in grade school and all the different esoteric rules kids had. I couldn’t remember if it was only good luck when you picked it up with heads or if it was specifically bad luck on tails.

I put it in my pocket anyway, I didn’t really care about good luck or bad luck, I was never superstitious. 

I sat back down on the bench and checked the time. It was ten minutes now and the person hadn’t shown up. How much time had I wasted in my life waiting for other people? Probably an accumulation of years at this point.  So often, that waiting wound up with someone not showing up at all. Disappointment or anger followed. In this instance, I really can’t remember if the person I was waiting for this day ever actually showed up, or what specifically we were going to do. It seems like that’s the more common result of waiting—anticlimax. How long had that penny been sitting there, I wondered, waiting for someone to pick it up?

I took the penny from my pocket and looked at it. It was from the current year. I was shocked; I had never seen a fresh one before. It struck me, for some reason. This penny hadn’t spent years on the ground or under a couch cushion. It hadn’t been exposed to sunshine and rain, it had no time to turn green and accumulate grime.  It hadn’t had the disappointment of being constantly passed over or left to sit in disuse. It was new to the harshness of the world.

It may have been lying tails-up, but I couldn’t help but feel like this was a lucky penny.

November 10, 2010