A Penny For Your Thoughts...
Yesterday I was going through the drive-thru of our local McDonald's. I had just taken my two year old daughter to get some blood work done. It was a routine thing (a lead test), but it was still pretty harrowing putting her through the experience. She was a trooper, but I felt so bad for her while I was holding her down as they stuck a needle in her little arm. She must have been wondering what the hell I was putting her through, and maybe wondering if I truly was a "Monster" of a dad. Anyway, after that experience I figured it was as good a time as any to indulge in a little McDonald's breakfast treat for us on the way home. So I ordered a couple items off the Dollar Menu (big spender!). My Sausage Biscuit and Sausage McMuffin came to a grand total of $2.14. I still haven't gotten used to the fact that Massachusetts has increased its sales tax from 5% to 6.25%. It used to be so easy to figure out that you had to pay five cents on every dollar. Now you have to add 6.25 cents to every dollar (a little tougher to do automatically in your head). I know it's only a few pennies, but I swear that some places take advantage of the fact that it's not a whole number and round the total up a little more than they should. Paranoid? Maybe. But I digress (again). Back to the random topic at hand...
After placing my order I heard "That will be $2.14 at the first window" from the speaker, and wondered if I might have the exact change in my wallet. Sure enough, I found a dime and a bunch of pennies in the change section amongst the other coins. I pulled out four pennies to go along with the dime and two singles. Then I had a few moments to wait because the line at the drive-thru was pretty long. I decided to check out the dates on the pennies while waiting. Big mistake! Instead of simply holding them and giving them to the cashier without incident (as most people would do) I just had to look at the dates on the pennies and ponder all kinds of things about them. Strange how four little pennies and a minute or two in a drive-thru waiting for food can give a person so much food for thought. Here's what I learned in those couple minutes...
The first penny was from 1967. It seemed strange to think that one of the coins in the small pile of change I held in my hand was older than me. Because I wasn't around in 1967 I didn't have to wonder what was going on in my life when that penny was minted. But I did try to ponder just how much that penny's little Abe Lincoln has seen over the past forty-four years. How many places had it traveled (has it been circulating in Massachusetts most of that time, or has it been through more states in its time than I have in mine?)? How many hands has it passed through?How many purchases had it been a part of (and what those purchases might have been)? Is it possible that I, or someone I know, have had this very same penny at some time in the past? How many people who have spent this penny have since died? How many pennies end up in a penny jar and never get the chance to do all the traveling that (I assume) this one has in its time? Could this very penny have spent a couple decades forgotten in a piggy bank before returning to the world of retail? It certainly seemed pretty well-worn, so I can only imagine it's seen quite a bit in its time.
The second penny was from 1980. This was right in the middle of my Monster Kid salad days. I kind of tend to relate the golden age of the show Creature Double Feature with my own high point of childhood. The show started it's familiar two-movies-on-a-Saturday-afternoon format in September of 1975 and ran straight through the early 1980s. They started messing with the format around 1983 (going from double-features to single ones and then back again, dropping the show altogether for short periods, changing the starting time...), and it finally petered out in 1985. In 1980 I would have been ten or eleven years old. There's no doubt that I was watching and being terrified by some of my favorite old horror and sci-fi movies at that age (many for the first time). In three years I'd enter high school and my priorities would start to change. But in 1980, I was deeply entrenched in my Monster Kid heyday. I wondered what the chances were that I may have owned this very penny around that time. Could this penny have been change for me in the early 80s when I bought a package of Twinkies at the little mom-and-pop convenience store down the hill from my house? Could I have dropped it in a gumball machine or used it to pay for a piece of penny candy (when there was still such a thing as penny candy)? Could it have helped pay for a string of bowling on one of the trips to the bowling alley my nephew and I would enjoy on Saturdays? (This was back in the days when kids could be dropped off at a bowling alley and left unaccompanied for a couple hours without fear of horrible things happening.) That penny has been making the rounds since those more "innocent" days and is still out there in this modern age of hyper-fear that prevents kids from having the "unstructured playtime" that made my childhood so magical. Were will that penny be in another 20 years, and what will that world look like?
The final two pennies were from 1992 and 1993 respectively. Suddenly we are in the distant future (as far as the 1967 and 1980 pennies would be concerned). I was an adult at that time. Not only had I graduated from high school five or six years earlier, I had even entered and left the Army and been back home for a couple years. The early nineties were a time of transition for me as I tried to figure out my place in the world and how I fit into it. While there weren't any pennies from the 2000s in my McDonald's pile to bring us up to date, I'd say that I'm still in a similar place now as I was in 1992-93. I'm getting older and older (am now married, own a house, have two beautiful and challenging daughters) but in many ways I still feel like that little Monster Kid who'd drop everything to sit in front of the TV on a Saturday afternoon to watch a couple old black-and-white monster movies on Creature Double Feature.
That's a lot of pondering over four measly pennies that just happened to be sitting my wallet yesterday morning. Suddenly it was 2011 again and my turn to drive up to the window and pay for my order. I made another check in my wallet and found four more pennies (which I made a point of NOT checking the dates of). I used them to pay for my breakfast and held onto the original four just long enough to write this blog before releasing them back into circulation for more monetary adventures in the great big world...
For more on my shaky relationship with the concept of Time, see Monster Dad vs. Time.
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