Pennies from Heaven

Pennies from Heaven

    Everytime it rains, it rains, pennies from heaven.  It was a hit song way back when; and way back when is what my brother and I discovered as we began to wrap things up at my mother's home.  The place was beginning to empty, even as we felt that munchkins or menehunes were sneaking in at night and slowly refilling drawers and adding small trinkets as we slept.  The cleaning out process seemed endless, and the trash dumpster that once seemed way too large was suddenly growing a bit too full (7 yards, a measurement new to me but often used in the construction and landscape industry, is really quite the volume...basically a "yard" is a cubic yard which is 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet, in other words, a lot).  We had ordered the bin through a company called Recology, one of the main waste and recycling companies throughout much of the western half of the U.S.  And we had already planned to sort and then recycle much (and there was a lot) of my dad's metal, everything from collected tins of nuts and bolts to rusted pipe fittings and long lengths of heavy chain.  Throw in the glass, the hefty volume of paper and carpet and plastic still arriving (some of the plastic was so old that it was brittle and would just crumble in your hands) and various other things that would simply count as trash, and well, it seemed that our work was cut out for us.  But one call to check with Recology and we were told to dump it all, that they recycled virtually everything at their facility (their only restriction was concrete and tree stumps, all of which they also recycle but in another special container, one sent primarily to construction sites).  Problem solved, and we began dumping in earnest.

    Throughout all of this, my brother and I felt that the process was a bit brutal, the term we used.  To so carelessly toss out or give away things that once meant so much to both of our parents.  But look at that word...care-less.  That wasn't the case.  We had glanced over much of the material, separating what we thought had deep meaning to them and what was likely just things they had collected over the years.  Our discarding was a necessary process, but one we felt, we were doing with care.  Our intentions were to both help my mother get her house ready for sale and also to do so before we ran out of time (my brother and I kept jokingly muttering the third-person phrase, "You're running out of time," from the day we arrived, knowing that what originally seemed a rather short task would likely turn into a last-minute scramble, which it did).  So her neighbor/gardener took her non-working mower and edger and gas cans, easily fixed he said), the charity groups returned for the beds and boxes and miscellaneous items, an antique dealer bargained away the old sewing machine (one which had prove frustratingly difficult to move due to its weight and one which nobody seemed to want since none of us knew how to sew), the birds and critters watched as the food began to litter the overgrown areas of the yard (a banquet for them since most of it was gone with the arrival of each morning) and the dumpster basically took the rest.  And on the last day, as we cleaned and polished, we discovered the pennies.

    Part of this cleaning process of your parents (and quite likely of us, when the time comes) is the discovery you make of the hidden corners of their lives.  Think of it, your friends and family likely see you for at most, 1% of your day (and likely more like .0001% of your life)...the rest is your own time.  As we dug in corners, pulling out the last of the rags and boxes of old mayonaise jars, we found another box, then another box of pennies.  One in the closet, one under a cabinet, one high on a shelf, an old tin in the garage.  Apparently, this was their hobby (confirmed by my mother), to sit and watch television while sorting the pennies they had collected, patiently putting them into rolls (way way back, banks would provide you papers rolls to gather and then turn in your coins, something even Las Vegas no longer condones), all while separating the newer Lincoln Memorial pennies from the older "wheat" pennies and the even older Indianhead pennies.  And there were a lot.  So we filled a fishing tackle box and took the first batch to a Coinstar machine.  We had never used one but they now appear in virtually every grocery store, the machine taking about 11% of the coinage as their fee but sorting and counting most of your spare change (rejecting any foreign or odd coins).  Our first batch?  4500 pennies (this taking place after WE had sorted through them).  In the end, we had reached 10,000 pennies, a time-consuming task even for the machine (it kept posting a message: My You Have A Lot of Coins...Give Us A Moment to Catch Up).  As we walked away, my brother, ever the history buff, pointed out that 10,000 was also the maximum number of concentration camp prisoners that Hitler's armies discovered they could execute and dispose of...per day!).  Put that way, each penny represented a person...it was difficult to comprehend.

    Wait a minute (getting back to the pennies), didn't we go through them, carefully looking for those rare 1943 coppers (truly rare since the copper was used in the war and the U.S. began making pennies from steel).  And weren't those wheat pennies worth something?  Turns out, the Lincoln pennies will likely never go up in value, even with their copper (now with actually little copper in them); and those "old" wheat pennies?...uncirculated (who keeps uncirculated pennies from that far back?) rolls go for an average of $7.  In an old metal soap dish, we discovered that my dad kept coins from his Navy days; Cuba, Brazil, even an 1898 florin, a two shilling coin that excited my wife since she was English (it was worth about $15 even in its exceptionally good condition), all along with some classic old paper money (which was worth even less). 

The older larger dollar pictured with a current dollar

    It all made me think of how much we all collect, from coins to books to what we think are valuable antiques, only for someone to later discover that in today's dollars, there is little value.  No, the value came from the joy of collecting and the joy of discovering.  For my parents, that patient sorting and separating and finding had likely brought them pleasure, likely as much as tucking those rolls safely away behind old mayonaise jars, feeling secure that in the not-to-distant future financial security awaited come a rainy day (now where did I put those things? -- actually, my mother still has quite the memory and accurately pointed out 95% of the places we should check in her home).  And for my brother and I, discovering not the coins but what our parents had done with some of their idle time, was worth far more than 10,000 pennies.  It was indeed a song, a hit.  Pennies from heaven.