Yesterday I was given a buffalo nickel in a handful of change. Of all things! A buffalo nickel! These were minted between 1913 and 1938, and though the date on mine has been completely worn away, meaning I’ll never know when it was struck, I do know that it was certainly no later than 1938 — at which time, apparently, a nickel would have bought you a jumbo loaf of sliced bread (at a time when being able to afford a jumbo loaf of anything was hardly a foregone conclusion).

Anyway – I have some pretty powerful feelings about old coins! And I wrote about them once. Hereunder, that post.

A PENNY FOR YOUR HALF A CABBAGE

I have this odd little habit. It’s harmless, but also seemingly pointless. Every once and a while I stop and wonder: Why is that again? I collect what are known as wheat head pennies.

And when I say “collect,” I mean rather as the girl collects the sticks to all the lolly pops she’s every had — there’s no real organization to it, certainly no rarefied treatment afforded, and I don’t really imagine that I’ll be doing anything with them in the future. I just like having them.

The wheat head penny, you see, was discontinued in 1959, when the wreath of wheat was replaced with an image of the Lincoln Memorial. If I hold a wheat head penny in my hand, it was first in someone’s pocket at least five years before I was born.

My collection is small — only 16, so far — the oldest minted in 1924, most in the 1950s. The boy knows to keep an eye out for them. If, for instance, we see-a-penny-and-pick-it-up-and-all-the-day-you’ll-have-good-luck, we take a good look to make sure it isn’t super old. I don’t much like how they smell — pennies were bronze in those years — and if I hold them for too long, my hands will stink for the rest of the day.

But holding them is kind of what I like the most.

These pennies made a real difference in real people’s lives. In the 1920s, you could get a pound of cabbage or watermelon with just two of them, and in 1932, a pound of wieners cost eight (meaning, if the 1932 wieners were roughly the same size as the wieners currently in my freezer, you could get two for just one of my pennies).

If I were to hop into my time machine with the sixteen wheat heads currently in my possession and head for 1946, I would be able to buy a dozen doughnuts, with one penny left as a souvenir (but of course I wouldn’t collect any more while there, because: Prime Directive). By the time the wheat head was discontinued, each individual penny carried a bit less of a wallop, but hey: With only 10, you could buy a Jiffy cake mix for your end-of-decade bash!

I like to think of the kids who were given these pennies in their stockings, about the woman who dropped them into coin purses or coffee cans in kitchen cupboards — real money, money that you counted and horded and made important decisions with. Something simple and daily that passed through hands and pockets and tills without number, until they came to find me, and I put them in my pocket, and then into a little bag, in a little box, on my dresser.

The day will come, I imagine, that my children will have to decide what to do with them. (“Do you want Mom’s pennies?” “Why’d she collect these again?” “I don’t know…”). I’d like to say I hope they feel free to get rid of them, but honestly? I hope they don’t. Maybe they’ll split the collection between them, or share with their own kids.

Of all the many objects we gather in an effort to preserve our history, it’s these sorts of things that I love the most — the little things. The things that people actually touched and used, carried with them into their day. I imagine some of my wheat heads have sad stories to tell as well: The boy who couldn’t buy the longed-for movie ticket, because my 1927 penny rolled under his bureau and he couldn’t see it. Or the tired waitress met by a surly customer, who thought leaving a one-penny tip might be funny. It’s not all piggy-banks and coffee cans when you’re a penny.

But that’s real, too. I like feeling that somehow, even without knowing the potentially millions of stories each of these coins could tell, I am still holding those stories safe, and — somehow — remembering.

Kia has created a Wonder Woman-themed Sportage to help build awareness for the We Can Be Heroes campaign, a philanthropic effort to aid the people in the Horn of Africa, who are still living through the region’s worst hunger crisis in 60 years (click here to read more about We Can Be Heroes, and as this isn’t Kia’s first superhero design for the campaign, click here to see the other cars).

And this, my friends, this is what a Wonder Woman car looks like…!

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I know I should want to be able to help the people in the Horn of Africa regardless, but honestly — I really, really want this car…!

Source: World of Superheroes; h/t @SonofBaldwin

A conversation unfolded at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s place yesterday regarding the difficulty of writing 800-word opinion pieces, and whether or not the form itself dooms the entire enterprise to failure.

I found myself taking the conversation personally (which, I will admit, is not the first sign of wisdom!), because writing 800-word opinion pieces is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done, and I do it a lot more than folks might realize, because I also write stand-alone op/eds for other people, too.

Work that I’ve produced has appeared under other people’s names in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and USA Today, just to name a few. On any given day, I might be writing about Israel/Palestine for Open Zion, about domestic politics or popular culture right here, and about some Hot Button Issue for a client, someone who’ll never meet me but who trusts me to put their policy goals into words. I produce some version of an 800-word opinion piece at least three or four times a week, often more.

I did the same thing when I was a freelance commentary writer, but my by-line reached a much broader audience back then. I wrote for the Des Moines Register about abortion and the Baltimore Sun about oil; I wrote for the Dallas Morning News about whiny rich people complaining about tech in their lives, and for the Chicago Tribune about the norms and mores of wearing shoes in the house. I wrote for a whole bunch of places about Israel/Palestine.

Almost every time, I had to hit a 750-word limit (I would have killed for another 50 words, frankly). Over the course of several years I added a new publication to my clips file about once a month, which is considered pretty darn successful in the rarefied world of freelance commentary writing. I was being considered for syndication just as the bottom fell out on print in 2008 and newspapers and agencies started hemorrhaging writers like America was about to start hemorrhaging money.

I’m Midwestern, so the following doesn’t come easy, but I’m going to say it: I was successful because I was good.

Writing to an 800 (or 750) word length is a skill, and the newspaper essay is an artform. Just like any other profession — arts, sciences, or home improvement — my field boasts its fair share of people who are bad at their jobs, or who are but middling-good. They can crank out words, but the words don’t hang well. They can crank out words, but their thought process is sloppy. They can crank out words, but they long ago confused opinion with fact. They’re bad at their jobs.

But a well-honed short essay, produced by someone who respects the craft and the readers, is a beautiful thing. It introduces one idea, whether a policy goal or a vision of little girls playing on a hot summer’s day, and tells the story of that idea. It conveys what that idea means for the big world, and what it means for individuals. A well-honed essay finds the universal in the personal and shines that out for the reader to hold and consider.

If the idea is meant to change lives or policy, it has to be supported by hard details — numbers, expert opinion, news — so that the opinions attendant upon the idea cannot be dismissed. If the idea is a cameo of human life, the details must be “soft.” They must look like life, not argument. They must bring forth something shared, or there’s no point.

And sure it’s hard to do that well. Sometimes I literally moan and I literally groan and I become absolutely convinced that I will never be able to write a lede ever again.

But just as bad novels don’t render novels themselves a dubious undertaking, and bad poems don’t throw all of poetry up for grab, bad 800-word essays do not condemn the form. A particular reader might not like the form — I, for instance, don’t much go for poetry — but that’s the reader. Not the form.

Ta-Nehisi raised the idea that part of the problem lies in too many writers having to produce those 800 words too regularly, and I might well agree with that. I’ve never had to maintain a daily column and I don’t think I’d want to, because that does guarantee a certain failure rate. Furthermore, I’ve never been paid to be a generalist at any single place, so I don’t honestly know what challenges that would bring.

I would love the chance to try, though. When the bottom fell out in aught-eight and it looked for a good while like I’d never get to write under my by-line again, I truly mourned, and one of the things I mourned was that I was never going to get a chance to get better.

I love this thing I do. I love the letters, the words, the structures I build with them out of pixels, and I love building, block by block, word by word, until I’ve formed something cogent within the limitations of that box on the newspaper page.

I struggle within the form (if you check, you’ll see I abused the endless space of the internet to go over my word limit here), but all writers struggle. Getting good at something is hard.

Just a reminder: It is possible to support the President on some issues & oppose him on others & retain your I’m A Progressive Card. #fyi

— Emily L. Hauser (@emilylhauser) February 6, 2013

Because: Dude.