Pennies aren’t worth much anymore. People leave them in trays by the cash register. Most prices are rounded off to the nearest nickel anyway. I’ve seen high school kids make a big show of dumping their pennies on the ground. Pennies are uncool.

I’m pretty cool myself. I have a pile of pennies in a silver basket on my bureau where I dump them when I empty my pockets at night. When I was younger and poorer, I used to wrap them in pink fifty-cent rolls and exchange them at the bank for shiny quarters and crisp bills. Now I don’t get around to it. The banks don’t count it and give you the money right away anyway. They just dump it into a counting machine and credit your account. I miss that direct transformation: pennies into dollars.

I used to pull out the older pennies, the 1941Ds or the 1956Ps and put them in blue books with penny-size slots. I would dream of all the money I’d make when I had a complete set or found that rare one in mint condition. And I enjoyed the almost meditative comfort of collecting and organizing.

My son Zach loves to collect. At five, he’s discovered that collecting money is even more fun. I sometimes find a chair left by my bureau that he’s forgotten about in his excitement at “finding” the pennies in my silver basket. When he finds coins in the car or between the couch cushions, I don’t dampen his excitement by wondering if they are mine. They’re worth more to him. Zach has a vague idea that bigger coins have greater value, but he likes them all. He organizes them into piles and counts them.

His little sister Erin follows Zach around. “Do you have any coins?” she asks in her little voice. Her piles are smaller and the pennies, nickels and dimes are all mixed up, but she’s happy to be a part of it. “We’re collecting,” she says proudly. For       them, I think the pennies represent possessions all their own and maybe independence – making their own decisions of what to buy and when. Maybe that’s why the high school kids treat pennies with such scorn. It’s a way to scoff at the financial stick adults hold over them (without costing them much of the little cash they have.)

Nanny, my grandmother, collected pennies in a big plastic bin for when “the girls” would come over to play gin. “A penny a point,” she explained one time when I went to Springfield to visit her. I helped her set up the card table for the big game. “One time I won almost five dollars,” she said.

When the girls came over you would have thought it was Monte Carlo. “The girls,” of course, were not the pictures of youth I had expected. They were friends from her sales job at Steigers, or friends from church, or friends of friends who had taken buses from all over Springfield for the weekly game. Not one was under sixty. With fresh red lipstick, firmly sprayed hair and Sunday dresses, they were ready for the big event. I remember them staking out their spots at the table with brown paper bags or plastic containers filled to overflow with pennies. It was a wonder that their frail arms could carry these loads across town, changing buses and walking the last few blocks to Nanny’s apartment.

I watched these pale old ladies come alive with laughter and daring, crying, “Gin!” triumphantly or slapping their cards down in disgust. “I needed one card! Who had the five of clubs?” For the girls these were more than pennies that they carried around; they were copper markers of independence and spirit and friendship.

Pennies aren’t worth much anymore, unless you are five or two or over sixty-five. Maybe I could learn something about the value of things. Maybe I ought to put a few pennies in my pocket each morning. When all the “coolness” of my life gets me down, I could take them out and squeeze them and think of toys and gin rummy, independence and dreams.

Originally published in Writing Tools