The final U.S. penny was pressed last week, at the Philadelphia Mint. This was inevitable, of course: When was the last time you used a penny—each one, incidentally, costing 3.69 cents to produce—to make a purchase? For me, it’s been so long I can’t recall. And yet, in my life, the penny continues to hold a place less financial than psychological, emotional: a space of memory and meaning, as it were. When I was a young child, mildly dyslexic and unable to determine left from right, my mother would put a penny in my left shoe so I could feel it beneath my arch and orient myself. Later, she passed along her belief in the heads-up penny as a good-luck charm, a quiet superstition shared by millions of Americans. To this day, when I see such a penny on the street, I pick it up; it feels like a secret message from the universe to me. A message of what? Of hope, perhaps, or sustenance. Or maybe more a whisper of reassurance, as if something somewhere were looking out for me.
The most dramatic of these moments took place during the summer of 1980, a month or so before I turned 19. I was taking time off between high school and college and had traveled west to San Francisco, where I was sharing a studio on Haight Street with two friends and living out (or pretending to) my hippie fantasy. The Haight, in those days, was pretty bleak: burnouts hawking dirty tabs of blotter, squatters in abandoned buildings on Masonic. I was confronting a set of contradictions I didn’t quite know how to navigate, between the romantic bohemian dream of the counterculture and the human wreckage washed up in its wake. The experience was disorienting, disassociating. I did not know, exactly, who or what I was.
On July 4, a group of us decided to drive up to Stinson Beach. We left the city around 10 a.m. Half an hour or so later, we had a blowout coming around a curve and began to fishtail in increasingly violent arcs. I was sitting in the middle of the back seat, and I remember the horror of the last few seconds before we struck a retaining wall. There it was, the end of my life, perhaps, coming at me through the windshield. I can’t tell you any longer if I screamed. What I can tell you is that after impact, the car flipped and rolled, one complete rotation, long enough for me to think, We’re upside down, before we landed upright on shredded wheels.
There was silence. There was gasping. There was the tentative testing of our bodies, unsteady, as if we were newborns, making sure we were OK.
Almost immediately—or so my recollection insists—California Highway Patrol was on the scene. We must have left the wreckage at this point, must have been huddled together on the shoulder. The windshield was shattered; the hood was smoking. First, the officer checked to make sure we were sober. (It was the Fourth of July, after all, and we were in our teens.) Then he told us: “It’s a good thing you all were wearing seatbelts.”
When we responded that we hadn’t been, he said: “You should have died.”
As we milled around, waiting for another friend to pick us up, I saw a glint of copper not far from the car. It was a heads-up penny, sitting on the shoulder like an affirmation, a sign of grace. On the one hand, I understood it was a coincidence. On the other, it felt to me like a gift, a talisman. I picked up the coin and slid it into my pocket. When I got back to San Francisco, I set it carefully on the windowsill.
By the time I left San Francisco to attend college, that penny had metastasized. Small stacks of the coins—heads up—cluttered the various surfaces of the studio as if they were household gods. Was it then that I began to carry three pennies in the watch pocket of my jeans? Either way, this is a habit, or a practice, I have long since observed. More than once, I’ve been pulled out of airport TSA lines after my pennies set off the metal detector. And my home, like every home I’ve had since 1980, remains adorned by its own votive clusters: three of them on my desk, three on my bureau, three more on the low bookcase beside my bed.
Is it too much to suggest that the penny has become for me a mechanism of mystique? Certainly, that was true when I lived in San Francisco. I wanted to believe in a magical universe, one in which things happened for a reason, even if it was beyond what we might understand. In the decades since, my thinking has deepened—or maybe I’ve come to accept that chaos is the point. Still, whether the universe is magical or chaotic, it certainly confounds us. It certainly does with us what it will. In that sense, the penny has long served as a kind of totem: if nothing else, part of a ritual (or series of rituals) by which I try to wrap my mind around the world.
And so, I lament the passing of the penny. I’m sorry to see it go. I feel as if a bit of necessary magic has been removed from the universe. I feel as if I have been abandoned in a way. I understand that billions of pennies remain in circulation, but that’s a statistic for collectors, and I have never been one of those. Instead, I am a gatherer, reaping whatever random pennies I discover in the street. Some are wheat pennies, from the early 20th century. Some are zinc-coated steel, from World War II. All of them conjoin to form a web, a matrix. Let’s call it a system of belief.
Belief, however, is an inside job. This, too, is a lesson I have learned. What really happened that July 4? Then and now, I believe a penny saved my life.•
