I spent all of last week writing/thinking/emoting about terrible things and while the Awful has hardly abated — indeed, in some quarters, it appears to be on a fast trip from bad to very much worse — I’ve decided that this week, I won’t write about it. I’ll tweet, I may well comment elsewhere, but this space will be largely Awful-free — except at the end of each post, where I will provide a few links to Your Day In Horrible, should you feel the need.
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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.
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Your Day In Horrible:
- The son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Gilad Sharon, published an astonishingly noxious op/ed in Israel’s best-selling newspaper yesterday, in the wake of the murders in the settlement of Itamar, saying, among other things: “You can take the wild Palestinian beast and put a mask on it, in the form of some fluent English-speaking spokesman. You can also put on it a three-piece suit and a silk tie. But every once in a while – during a new moon, or when a crow’s droppings hit a howling jackal, or when pita with hyssop doesn’t come out just right – the wild beast senses that this is its night, and out of ancient instinct, it sets off to stalk its prey.” I don’t do Nazi comparisons, as a pretty hard-and-fast rule, but the simple truth is that I believe we would be very hard-pressed to find a tonal difference between this and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. Also, it’s worth noting that Gilad Sharon just joined the ranks of the putatively “centrist” Kadima party, headed by Tzipi Livni.
- Oh look, the GOP is ambushing the Environmental Protection Agency! “It’s not just that the House GOP is pushing—and will likely pass—a bill that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating planet-warming emissions and nullify the agency’s scientific finding that those gases endanger human health. Congressional Republicans have mounted an all-out assault on the EPA, pushing a lengthy list of measures to handcuff the agency from exercising its regulatory authority. For good measure, they are also trying to slash the agency’s budget by a third.” Read it and weep (I know I feel I could).
- Fifty unimaginably brave workers now stand between Japan and nuclear disaster — and who knows if they’ll even succeed: “A small crew of technicians, braving radiation and fire, became the only people remaining at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Tuesday — and perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.
They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.
They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.”

Shadow's Mom
/ March 15, 2011For years, I sought out and collected house linens, sewing books, and teapots. I loved the sense of history surrounding tablecloths, doilies, and dishtowels from earlier times, and I’d sometimes make clothing from them. Sewing books from before 1950 included detailed directions for creating slipcovers, draperies as well as tips on redesigning an old dress to freshen it with new collars and cuffs.
Your stories about where a penny might have been remind me of the Secret Lives of Dresses at the Dress a Day blog.
emilylhauser
/ March 15, 2011A) I love your story, & I can totally imagine, particularly if I were more craft-minded. I really kind of wish I were.
and B) Thank you for that link to Secret Lives of Dresses! By which I mean: Curse you! For it shall eat much of my time!
dmf
/ March 16, 2011good to remember the sensual qualities of non-virtual things that tie us to the world:
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/03/the-value-of-being-befuddled-occasionally-by-the-things-life-casts-your-way-or-the-attempt-to-live-a.html
Donna Rowsell
/ March 16, 2011And those 50, those are people we can truly call heroes, who have completely sacrificed all.
Bill Harshaw
/ March 16, 2011In the 1940’s the local GLF store (farmer’s co-op) had two machines: put a penny in one and you got a gumball; a penny in the other and you got a child’s handful of peanuts.