I Like Change

When I was seven or so, I lost a front tooth. I wrapped it in tissue and stuffed it beneath my pillow, falling asleep quickly as only a seven-year-old can do. Not even anxiety over a visit from the Tooth Fairy kept me awake. The next morning, I immediately searched for my prize only to be simultaneously puzzled and excited. My tooth had been exchanged for a coin much larger than a quarter with the image of a lady stepping into a sunrise embossed upon it.

When I grew older and understood more about the nature of fairies and such, my mother explained how parents often assisted the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus and that on the eve of my tooth loss, no one had any pocket change and so, the family coin collection was ransacked. That is how I became the proud owner of a 1945 Walking Liberty half-dollar now worth about twenty-three dollars and ninety-five cents. My family was into stamp and coin collecting, as these were affordable hobbies with the tease of a big payoff. As a result, I have a cache of coins ranging from wheat pennies to a gold, South African krugerrand.

During this last Covid winter, the disrupted circulation of coins caused a shortage where I live, here, in Montana. This brought on a bit of unexpected ennui and sadness. I do not like the thought of a world without coins.

I mastered counting to one hundred with pennies and enjoyed those grade school worksheets where I learned that 4 quarters equal a dollar, as do 10 dimes, twenty nickels, or one hundred pennies. I was exceptionally proud paying for penny candy out of my coin purse—the type that looked like a football, and when squeezed, yawned to reveal my allowance. My grandfather taught me who FDR was by referring to the face of a dime. A romantic interest showed me how Kennedy’s profile, that adorns a fifty-cent piece, can also be seen amidst the shadowy craters of a full moon. And, once, I stayed at a fancy hotel in San Francisco, the Westin St. Francis, where an employee has, since the 1930s, washed every coin received at the hotel before it is recirculated.

I suppose your mother told you, as mine told me, not to put money in your mouth. “That’s filthy!” “Dirty!” “You don’t know where that’s been!” I don’t think there has been a child born who hasn’t popped a shiny copper penny or silver dime into the old kisser.

Most likely, coins are dirty, unless they have come from the St. Francis Hotel. They may even harbor terrible viruses, and yet, the idea of a coinless world is unsavory to me. (Pun intended.) Call me old-fashioned or stuck in the past, but I prefer money that jingle-jangles in my pocket and that I can hold in my hand and toss, much more than a bit of coin existing somewhere in the ether.