Passage V

Not Just Pocket Change

My interest in coin collecting began when I was a child digging in my backyard. In a tulip bed underneath the kitchen window, I expected to find a dinosaur tooth or maybe a tunnel to a magical underworld. Unearthed, I didn't expect to find several old coins. A few corroded pennies, their coppery surfaces pitted and had been tarnished, blended in with the soil. I noticed a nickel in the dirt too and wiped it off on my jeans. Larger and heavier than any nickel I'd held before, it felt strange in my palm. As I read, the modern world seemed to fall away.

Weeks later, when the novelty of the coins had faded, I exchanged them with a classmate for a bag of marbles. When my older siblings heard of the trade, they teased me for giving away a fortune. Out of pride, I insisted they were wrong, but I wondered secretly if they were right.

That's when I started researching and collecting coins in earnest. By the time I learned that coin collecting, or numismatics, had begun in the Italian Renaissance, I am developing a habit of checking every handful of change for a rare or old coin—or one that was both. Every so often I'd find a Lincoln penny with the "wheat" design on the back. One time a vending machine gave me a "buffalo" nickel in change. Another time my weekly allowance included a dime with an incorrect mint mark; such a defect makes a coin particularly valuable.

Collecting coins brings other time periods into focus. For instance, the change in the metal composition of U.S. coins, minted during World War II, points out the adjustments made as part of the war effort. (69) Information, stories, a sense of other settings and other lives—these all accumulate to the appeal of coins for collectors like me. Nevertheless, I enjoy attaching stories to the coins I own and to the coins I don't. I wonder, for instance, where that collectible coin is now. In a bus driver's pocket? In a box lined with velvet? Wherever those are, they will always clink around with all the others in my imagination.(74)