Good Luck Pennies

I know how I will die.

It will be in the middle of a busy street. I will be old, and I will be bending over to pick up a penny. It will be heads up—that means good luck.

It will be my mother’s fault. See a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. That was what she told me when I was a little girl, and it has been my mantra all these years. I’m not picky about the pennies being heads up, although that is more satisfying than if they are face down. If I find one that is face down, I rub oak as soon as I can to ensure the good luck. It doesn’t matter what kind of oak—a tree, a chair, a table—but it has to be oak. I do this with heads-up pennies too. Why tempt fate?


I read somewhere that finding a penny heads up means you will get money soon. That is why I am so zealous about looking for them. Luck is nice, but money coming to me sounds like something worth bending over for. So I pick up pennies. And not just pennies—I pick up nickels, dimes, and quarters too, although these are harder to come by. Pennies have so little value today that people drop them like litter on the streets. My husband will drop pennies and not bother to pick them up. It irks me, because that is throwing away money. Wasteful. I can see my mother’s disapproving eyes even as I write this. A penny saved is a penny earned. No one has so much money that they should throw it away. If they do, they should give it to someone who needs it. That is what my mother would say.


If finding a penny will bring me money, then it stands to reason that finding a dime or a quarter will bring ten or twenty-five times more money than the penny. Last week I found two dimes on the floor of the coffee house. No money has come my way yet, but I am certain it will—someone is probably planning to send it to me right now. It could be true. One day I found a nickel and when I got my mail there was a check I was not expecting. Another time I found a dime, and my expense check was waiting for me when I got to work. Even if the money was expected, it wasn’t expected today. That’s the beauty of it, you see. The money might be rightfully due to me, but I do not know when it will arrive. Perhaps finding pennies hastens its arrival?


My family thinks I am obsessed with pennies. I pick them up on sidewalks, remove them from caked garden soil, find them in parking garages and in stores. Once we were looking at a chest of drawers in a used furniture store, and when we opened it, there was a penny. I put it in my pocket. We opened another drawer, and there was another penny. My husband looked at me, then picked it up and stuck it in his own pocket. We both got luck from looking at that blue painted chest. We did not buy the chest. We found we did not need it, so in a way, those pennies brought us money because we had the money we would have spent on the chest.


Sometimes I find paper money. That is a real occasion. I found a dollar once, in the stairwell of the parking garage. I bought a good cup of coffee with that. Another time it was a five-dollar bill on the floor of the same garage. I gave that to my son’s girlfriend, spreading the good luck to her. She needed luck more than I did at the time. I do not know what she did with it, or if brought her any luck. But it made me feel good, and that was worth something on a rainy dark day.


It does not matter who is with me when I pick up pennies. Once it was the library director, and we were walking down a street to a meeting. She was talking about something, changing a policy I think. I looked down and there was a penny looking back at me. I stopped and picked it up. I had to—it was face up. She didn’t notice that I’d stopped, and was surprised when I showed her my penny. She does not pick them up, I could tell that from her face. Some people pass up good fortune all the time, and never know what it is they miss.


Only once did I see a penny I did not pick it up. It was in Cincinnati, and we were at a restaurant with friends. I went to the ladies’ room and selected a stall. As I prepared to sit down on the commode, I chanced to look down—and there was a penny. Heads up, in the bowl of the commode. I stared at it. It was brightly copper, shining in the cold water of the toilet bowl. I could not pick it up. I just could not do it. I wanted to, believe me, but a toilet bowl in a crowded restaurant did not seem like the place good luck would reside. I couldn’t sit down, either, not with Abe Lincoln staring up at me. I left that stall and chose another, but I stopped on the way out to stare at that penny one more time. I hated to leave it there, but that is what I did. To this day I wonder about that penny, about how it got in the toilet bowl in the first place, and if anyone else dared to pick it up. All that luck down the drain.


My family may be right—it may be that I am obsessed with pennies. I cannot prove beyond a doubt that the pennies I have found have brought me luck. It’s a feeling, like the anticipation a gambler feels with a race ticket in hand and the horses in the starting gate. This one might be a winner. A long shot perhaps, but until the first horse crosses the finish line, every ticket is a winner. So it is with pennies. And until the day I meet my fate in the middle of a street picking up a penny, I can believe that each one has the power to bring me luck, someday.

That last penny will be face down. I am sure of that.