See a penny pick it up; all day long you’ll have good luck. I was very familiar with this adage before I heard Frenchie excitedly utter it when she found a penny on the floor of the LA River basin before Danny raced at Thunder Road.
When my parents go out for their walks each day they delight in how much change they can find on the ground to bring home with them. They are very good at scouting out the hidden gems of pennies, nickels, and dimes. No one seems to drop quarters. I guess people still find a value in those.
Why is change litter? Why are coins so disposable that people drop them and don’t care to retrieve them? I know that we’re not all so well off that not every penny counts. Currency is currency. We can use any kind to make purchases or pay a debt.
When I was a little girl I would roll pennies for my neighbor. It was fun to do. I’d count pennies and then stack them. I’d make sure there were 50 before rolling them and sealing them off with tape. I don’t know why I didn’t do the same thing for my own mom. I remember going to the bank with her to dump change into a big machine that counted it. Then the bank no longer had that machine. If you needed to deposit coins, they had to be rolled with your account number written on the side of the roll. Then the bank stopped accepting rolled coins. I guess it’s not that surprising that pocket change doesn’t get any respect.
The last time my husband and I wanted to get rid of our accumulated change we took it with us to a Laughlin, Nevada casino and cashed it in there. No one asked questions or gave us grief.