I have a piggy bank in the shape of an orange mushroom.
I carry cash. My friend gave me a Dante money clip. She carries one too. Dante is a cira-1915 restaurant in the village with exceptional cocktails.
Cash means change. I’ve learned the habit of paying exact change. I am the girl at the counter rummaging for pennies while you are in a hurry.
Inevitably, I come home with change. It loiters in my pockets, bags, guitar cases. When the mushroom is full, I venture to one of those machines that turns your coins to cash for a percentage. This week I noticed I was due for a trip. Be it divine intervention or an electrical glitch in my neural pathways, I instead decided to go to the bank and ask for paper coin rolls.
I emptied the coins on my bed and started to sort them (to Bill Evans). Instantly, I felt like a pirate discovering a treasure I’d hid long ago and forgotten. For I had remembered a lost obsession: I treasured coins as a kid. I’d sort my family’s coin jar by date for fun, keeping older coins. My grandpa Joe collected, too. I remember visiting his furniture store. He had a toaster in the back. I ate jelly toast while he gave me a history lesson.
On my bed with this recent lot, I checked the coins’ dates, hearing the heavy sound when my hand moved through them, minding their metallic smell. In the moment I found a 1945 Mercury Dime, I was flood with metaphor and conviction. I have been denying myself a pleasure and ritual I once took great joy in. I have no honorable reason why.
This experience wasn’t about coins at all. This was about the so-called “magic” of childhood and the so-called loss of it as one ages. It was a remembering of how I once shamelessly itched my intrigue and filled my senses. With age, comes exposure to the frequently unforgiving winds of life. With age, also comes intentionality. I would not trade my capacity for intentionality for innocence. I would train myself to be intentionally childlike, again.
For I have forsaken much of my once uninhibited curiosity in order to squish myself into places that seemed necessary for survival – socially, emotionally and physically. It became ritual to brood on my woes. It became habit to see woe, when threat there was none. Let’s just say my imagination stayed in tact. But if I once had the capacity to have effortless faith in my abilities and in the time given to me, I do believe that capacity remains now that I’m big.
Needless to say, I will never have my coins sorted for me again. I shrill at the thought of how many moments of discovery I’ve missed. How many Mercury Dimes I might have, to remind me that life is small and intricate. To remind me that time often rewards a steady hand and a present mind, both of which I habitually forget that I have.
