A Penny, For Your Thoughts

“I don’t have a pyin,” she says.

“That’s alright—use mine,” he replies. And he hands her a pen from behind his ear.

“No—this is a Visa gift card,” she explains. “I can’t use debit because I don’t have a PIN. How do I do credit?”

The cashier’s eyes will light up with clarity. He’s recently arrived here from Arkansas; another one among the ceaseless swarms come Gone To Texas since 1840. He might go on to tell his customer, “Well that’s fascinating; I read recently that one of the most recognizable traits of the Southern dialect is that there’s no phonic distinction between the words ‘pin’ and ‘pen.’” He could say that, but the woman buying acrylic paint and Styrofoam at his register might just wanna gitalong with her day. This kid is from out of state and still trying to find his way among the cowboys. He hasn’t even yet caught on to the right word for “soda.” Why, to call it “pop” is an infallible sign that the speaker has no hold on reality.

It’s my turn in line. We look eye-to-eye and make idle talk. He gives me my change and I mosey along, inspecting the pennies out of habit. Lately I’m keen on collecting old coins because they’re one of the few everyday items that advertise their age. A dirty denim dollar does the same thing, but I’m a bit too cheap to hoard those. Pennies are so common that it ain’t nearly no one who will notice them out of circulation, so I’m free to keep and invent little journeys for today’s fine democratic soldier in my palm. This one here is stamped 1976 in Philadelphia. The U.S. Mint estimates that these coins last thirty years—what a warrior this one is! Where are your comrades? Were they pulverized into dust; neglected in a sewer? Swallowed by a child, to perish with the proletariat?

This interest began last year at end of term. I stood in a stripped suite making final inventory of the semester. I dumped my cup of coins onto the desk, admiring the bright cupreous noise of the pre-1983 pennies (since then they’re all copper-plated zinc; no sparkle to their spatter). I arranged them chronologically and found our peculiarsome Abe present for every year in the past five decades—except for 1965. Nor is it anywhere to be found in any transaction for the next month. What gives? Is there a conspiracy to eliminate this year from the nation’s history? What happened in 1965?

Many things happened. The Gateway Arch was completed in St. Louis. LBJ debuted the Great Society. Saul Bellow won the National Book Award for “Herzog.” I finally meet the elusive coin at a café in Berkeley during the summer—but where else to find the ’60s? President Lincoln smirks in profile, evidently etched into the same gaunt clay that he inhaled as a twenty-something working the land in Kentucky. I dash back across the Bay to a rendezvous in the Lower Haight, not half a mile from the San Francisco Mint. My remaining time living and working for a spell in Northern California seems charmed by that lucky coin.

Bellow’s moody philosophical character, Moses Herzog, thinks about the high-minded topics. He calls the soul an amphibian: “it lives in more elements than I will ever know; and I assume that in those remote stars, matter is in the making which will create stranger beings yet.” At home, deep in the heart of Texas, it’s well understood that the stars at night are big and bright. They make me wonder a bit too often if we’re really so different from the earth-substance that goes into those pennies. My heart may or may not be in San Francisco, but my soul is certainly in many places.

My soul is partly there at the end of a narrow spiral staircase in the back corner of the House library, aching over a paper on John Donne. In “A Valediction of Weeping” he writes:

Let me pour forth

My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,

For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,

And by this mintage they are something worth

Pennies may be worthless on their own, especially in the machine of the economy. Alone they are no more special than something as coarse and quotidian as tears. We give things value by wedding them to our experience: with our words, our sighs, our stories. The French philosopher Alain Badiou explains (recently, in a fun video series!) that money has personal value only in the implied access it gives us to our various desires. He says that the limits of these desires are in turn related to the limits of our language. Among pens and pins and pennies, expanding our world is only about looking in the right places. On the tips of our tongues; in the palms of our hands. Quaerendo invenietis, so look sharp!

—Columnist David Grieder can be reached at davidgrieder@college.harvard.edu.