Coinage

This was a bit too long to post with the rest of the things in my last post, so here it is in its own post!

Awesome moment at work: a woman paying in cash today had a couple of foreign coins in her pile of pennies. Being near the border (near-ish...) we're allowed to take Canadian coinage, but not paper money--but not from anywhere else. So I let her pay with her Canadian pennies but not with the one from... Barbados!

See, I collect coins. I don't usually find foreign ones, though I'm known at work for asking customers if I can trade them a penny from my register for their old wheat-back Lincoln pennies and 1976 'drummer' quarters.

For the uninitiated: Lincoln cents until 1959 had two sheaves of wheat and the words 'ONE CENT' on the back instead of the Monument, hence the name 'wheatback' or 'wheatie'. The US Mint also for one year--1976--produced quarters with a drummer on the back instead of an eagle to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration. These are all still legal tender--since every scrap of currency ever printed by the US Mint is still legal tender, these are still sometimes found in circulation, though not so much anymore since people like me keep snipping them up. Still, I can say from experience it is entirely possible to find a Lincoln wheatback cent from 1914 in circulation in the year 2012. It might just be me, but I find there to be something kind of... otherworldly, almost, I guess? Something... reverent, something special about holding a coin in your hand that predates you by such a huge margin. It's one thing when you're youngish like I am and are holding a coin that predates you by a few years. Maybe it feels a little surprising--if you're inclined to think about it, anyway--to hold a coin that predates your parents. But to hold a coin in your hand that's been in consistent circulation, been handled by people and used in business transactions from one person to another, for nearly a century? That feels... interesting. Think of all that coin lived through. That coin saw the invention of cars, it saw suffrage, it saw two World Wars. It saw the rise of radio, of movies, of television, of computers, of the internet. It saw the end of Jim Crow laws. It saw Roe v. Wade. And now I have it. It never fails to amaze me.

And also I'd never even seen money from Barbados. The woman had no idea where it came from because she didn't even know that Barbados was a country.

I asked if I could have it for a 'real' penny and she gave it to me. Most people do this, actually--since it's just a penny and I'm so cutely enthusiastic about my finds, they tend to just let me have them.

Which is a lot safer than pinching coins from my till. Which I also do. Ssh!!