A penny for my thoughts

Shed a tear for the penny. Today is the beginning of the end as the penny gets taken out of circulation. This event was even celebrated by Google with the Canadian penny replacing the first “o” in the word Google on the search engine’s home page.

Despite the nuisance value in recent years of battling to find a couple of pennies in your pocket to make exact change for a cash transaction, I will miss the penny. Think of all the sayings that are now minus that metal marker. A penny saved is a penny earned. In for a penny, in for a pound. The penny dropped. Time was when the penny bought you something. When my two offspring were young, I’d take them every Saturday morning to the public library and then to a corner store run by a curmudgeon named Louie who would become increasingly impatient as they studiously chose among his wide selection of candy all priced at three pieces for a penny. For ten pennies you could fill a good-sized paper bag with mints, liquorice and gumballs.

Confusion will reign for a while in the new penny-less regime as retailers and shoppers battle over rounding down and rounding up, but we’ll eventually come to some understanding. We might even get used to it. After all, there once was a fifty-cent piece and a silver dollar that would show up on birthdays and bonfire nights.

There may even be a silver lining in losing the copper. I’m one of those superstitious souls who sees a penny lying on the sidewalk, picks it up, and puts it in my left shoe. At a young age, I learned the rhyme,”Find a penny, pick it up/All day long you’ll have good luck./See a penny, leave it there,/All day long, you’ll have despair.” My fervent hope is that people will continue to toss aside their “worthless” pennies so that I can still find them regularly. Otherwise, where’s my good luck going to come from?