'Spent for These Thoughts, to Tell Us Who We Are'

Cash, they say, is passé, usurped by Bitcoin and plastic. I don’t believe it. Without currency, and despite the debit/credit cards, my wallet feels empty. My idea of financial planning is putting the singles and fives in order. And think of the loss to language. There must be more slang terms for money than for drunkenness and sex: simoleons, dough, moolah, bread, scratch, Benjamins, the long green, smackers . . .   

Coins have heft. I collect pennies from the sidewalk and keep them in a Mason jar. When filled, I take it to the machine at the grocery store that turns coins into currency, my kind of recycling. I’ve known people who were afraid to handle change. The coins, they feared, carried disease. Thus, filthy lucre. I once interviewed a coin/currency collector who specialized in the money issued by leper colonies and not honored as legal tender anywhere else. Again, fear of contagion. There’s another way to look at money: as a series of links to the past, each holder a temporary caretaker, a fiduciary steward a degree of separation from the mint. Here is R.S. Gwynn’s “To a Wheat Penny Found in My Change” (Dogwatch, Measure Press, 2014):

“Lifted from a flapper’s beaded purse,

You dribbled through Scott’s fingers, whence you fell

On the shut eye of one bound for a hearse

But were plucked off before he paid in hell.

“Soon you were tendered by a shabby man

To a lady proffering winesaps; next you went

To a crackpot who’d devised a flawless plan

And yearned to urge it on a President.

“Stacked with nine brothers, to a dime-a-dance

Girl from an undue admirer, you became

A lucky one for Pvt. V in France,

Who flipped you to a whore who had no name.

“You came back as the bad ones always will,

To snore six decades in a Mason jar—

Released, returned now for a wrinkled bill,

Spent for these thoughts, to tell us who we are.”