Penny: Here for It, #351

Hi! It's R. Eric Thomas. From the internet?
Hi!

This week the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia produced the last penny ever and I have decided to take it personally. I don't particularly care about pennies, although I do appreciate that they're a different color than other change and that feels special. Like the penny was a DEI hire in the currency market. Was the penny discontinued because of woke? Something to consider. Many people are saying this.

But, like, what are we supposed to be doing now when it comes to getting change? The CVS owes me 53 cents and instead I get two quarters and a wink? If a cashier winks at me, I'm calling the authorities. I don't wish to be walking around this world owed various amounts of money but this nation's corporations.

That has the distinct aroma of a scam! Like, spiritually, I already feel like every corporation in America is slowly siphoning away two cents here and seven cents there and I just don't know about it. (Not for nothing, but this was also--sort of--the plot of Superman III, the one with Richard Pryor. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this film in any way. It begins with Richard Pryor, a chronically unemployed man, discovering that he is some kind of computer genius, because that's a thing that happened in the 80s. He finds a computer loophole that allows him to collect all the partial cents that accrue from government benefits payments. Instead of going and being rich somewhere he gets involved with the actual villain of the movie, an Elon Musk-type--aren't they always?--who wants to create synthetic Kryptonite. None of it makes a damn bit of sense but it did make me think, hmm, I bet the government owes me money and I bet Richard Pryor knows where it is.)

Why would they take my penny? The penny isn't doing anything to anyone. I feel about the penny the way that some people feel about Pluto being demoted as a planet. What a boondoggle that's been, huh? It was demoted then re-promoted and then demoted again. It's like, hang it up, Galileo! Stop bothering us with this. I will never see Pluto (because I do not believe space is real). I don't have the emotional bandwidth to walk this journey with you right now.

What are we to do with the word penniless now? Am I supposed to start describing my economic state as nickel-less? IT DOESN'T SCAN!!!

What is the current state of wishing wells and fountains, actually, now that pennies are going? Are there Venmo links on the fountains in all the empty malls in America? Heaven forfend! If a wishing well ever asked me to scan a QR code, I'd have to take a mental health day.

(When you work for yourself, a mental health day is a real haunted hayride. I need to get away from my boss, who is me, and my work, which is my brain, so I can solve my problems, which are my brain and me. Someone pass me the Costo-brand Kryptonite, please.)

The death of the penny signals a crisis in the contemporary capacity to wish! This is my hot take. Should I submit it to The Atlantic?

When I was a child, my paternal grandmother always used to give us change on special occasions. Sometimes when I tell this story it seems a little sad to me, because my grandparents never had money to speak of. And that makes me sad because they worked very hard and because that kind of want gets baked into your DNA, epigenetically, which is why I work very hard. But this isn't a sad story. It's a story of abundance.

For birthdays and Christmas, she would collect her change, pennies and nickels and sometimes dimes for weeks or maybe months and she'd fill old prescription bottles with them and tape them to the sides of the bottles. She'd give them to me and my brothers and I felt so rich. Children are, notoriously, chronically un-employed (though, if this administration has their way, not for long). So, I never had money. But when I got these rattling bottles of change the whole world was my oyster.

Because I was a child and my understanding of wealth came from Scrooge McDuck (I was a problematic child), I would spread the change on the bed and pretend to swim in it. Which is, from a microbiological perspective, disgusting. But I wasn't thinking about microbiology. I was 7 years old and I was thinking about my capacity to dream beyond my world's edges.

Money has the capacity to make us feel so small, so limited. But these bottles of change were more thrilling than any paycheck I've ever gotten. (Which is not to say that those who are planning to send me checks should stop.) They may not make any more pennies, but wishing is free.

Linda Goor Nanos wrote a really thoughtful, lovely article about my advice column in Next Avenue. Read it here!

The column is syndicated in over 100 newspapers and sometimes those papers choose their own headlines for the column, which is fine. Every once in a while, the headline writer comes up with a gem that really tickles me when I discover it in my Google alerts. Like this one:

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hang it up, Gallileo,
Eric