Chris Walsh (chris_walsh) wrote,
Chris Walsh
chris_walsh

Henry Huggins's head would explode!*

Coins on the road. I find them. That's because I look for them, and I find them more often than you'd think, then I save them. My penny jar is just on the edge of overflowing, which means I have more than 600 pennies since I started refilling this jar — yes I've filled it before, and gotten that change made into dollars — and as I was out today I was on the lookout for more change. I went downtown, treated myself to diner lunch at John's Café on Old Town Chinatown, then walked to the library followed by the Portland State Sesame Donuts, and found coins on the way. A penny here, a couple pennies there, then once I'd gotten home and was running an errand at the fruit-and-veggie stand not far from where I live I found a nickel plus I got some change from my food purchase, then I headed home again...

...and saw the throat of a driveway — yes, that's what the transition between a driveway and a street is called — with a spilled mess of pennies. Which no one had claimed, and which I picked up (along with a spent battery I've now put in my bag of batteries to be properly disposed of).

FIFTY-THREE PENNIES. Fifty-three, one of them from 1956 (left by a messy time-traveler?), now collected and on my bedroom desk. That's on top of the 21¢ in pennies, plus a dime and a nickel I'd gotten earlier in my travels (quick, how many coins is that? Do the algebra!**).

There's a good chance I'm above 700 pennies now. I'll find out for sure eventually. Meanwhile, these pennies have a good home.


* I'm reading Henry and Beezus, Beverly Cleary's second Henry Huggins novel, and in it he's trying to earn enough money for a bike. Maybe I'll update in a later post whether he gets one. I'm helpful.

** No, the math is simpler than that. Six pennies, a nickel and a dime were in my batch of earlier change. But you could have used algebra...
Tags: peregrinations
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