Liddy and Loo like to travel, even if it's only walking the 20 or so blocks around the South Jersey neighborhood where they live. But a funny thing happens aver the past couple of years while they walk around. . . they find pennies, boy do they find pennies

MANY PENNIES
By Max Blue
1/19/2001
Three weeks into the 21st century, the new millenium at last. It’s a gloomy, cold rainy day in south Jersey …it’s yukky says Liddy. It’s the kind of day that makes you want to just chuck everything and take off for somewhere that the sun is shining. Like Costa Rica. We leave at 6 tomorrow morning. It’s not a spur-of-the-moment thing … we’ve been planning it since last September. That’s when we started this regular schedule of walking so we would be in shape to hike the trails of Monteverde.
We have this regular route that takes us down Fishpond road and through the neighborhood park next to the Glassboro water tower … it takes almost an hour and when I checked it out with the car for mileage it was close to two and a half miles. That comes out to 25 miles every 10 days. We didn’t walk every day, what with wind and all, but we didn’t miss too many. If you add all the days from September, when the days start to get shorter, through the 3rd week in January, the total is about 140 days. It wouldn’t be too far off to say we walked 100 days during that time which means we walked about 250 miles, about far enough to get us to Pittsburgh.
It was mostly a morning walk, we would usually get back around 9:45. We saw lots of interesting things on our walks … well maybe not lots, things are pretty calm in this part of south Jersey. We saw a few interesting things on our walks. Kids waiting for school buses looked at us like we were dropped from another planet, and when we tried to talk to them they didn’t seem to understand what we were saying. Maybe it was because Liddy kept saying "buenos dias" to get ready for our trip to Costa Rica. One time a lady in a car stopped to tell us that she had noticed us walking almost everyday, and she just wanted to tell us she thought it was nice.
Another time we saw a pair of Eastern Bluebirds sitting on a fence …a small, airforce-blue bird with just a touch of orange fluffy feathers on its chest … a lovely bird, and a first sighting for us. We saw only two, and only for a few days in October; we still look for them every time we pass that fence. They are long gone, but we can still picture them sitting on that fence. One day we took our binoculars so we could get a really good look … that look is now locked into the bird-section of our memory banks, available for instant viewing anytime we choose.
In the small bungalow just across the street from the park lives a man with a heavy accent, Liddy thinks he is Greek, we don’t know his name, and he doesn’t know ours, but we would have no trouble counting him as a friend. We spoke to him often over the fence protecting him and the house from who knows what kind of intrusion. We had to comment on his half-dozen or so tomato plants all neatly enclosed in wire cages reaching above our heads. He was growing them for sauce that his wife, who we saw occasionally hanging clothes to dry but never spoke to, would preserve in glass jars through a canning process. Never mind that this is the 21st century and you can buy pretty cheap all the canned tomatoes you could ever want in any supermarket, and probably even in the nearest WaWa convenience store. Of course Liddy would say, "Yes, but they don’t taste the same as tomatoes picked off your own vine." Liddy is right, but I think that taste is not the issue here, the Greek grows his own tomatoes because that’s what he has always done. Later we learn that he is a Palestinian, the first we ever knew.
This old man also has two fig trees, and he wanted us to taste the figs. I don’t know why I had the odd notion I didn’t like figs … probably from eating Fig Newtons, a truly disgusting cookie we used to get sometimes when I was a kid. I’m sure I never tasted a sweet fig just picked off a tree, but when I did I understood why people liked them, and why this man had to devise ways to keep the squirrels out of his fig trees. The next time I see this old man I must remember to tell him that 4,000 miles away there is a fig tree in the middle of Costa Rica where squirrels are eating the figs just like here in south Jersey. He might be interested to know that White-faced monkeys also like those Costa Rican figs.
On our walks, Liddy and me also made nodding acquaintances with several regulars who had a habit of walking in the park … a couple of couples, a few singles, some young, some old, some walking briskly, some slowly with a slight limp.
And, at last I come to it, there were the pennies. In those three months or so before the weather turned sour, we found 37 pennies at various spots along the route. I tried to make the case that the pennies mostly showed up after a rain and were clearly pennies from heaven, but Liddy would have none of that. The most common place was along Stoneshire Drive, which is our street … Liddy thinks it’s mostly kids dropping them since we found one close to the school bus stop. What gets me is why so many pennies? We did find dimes (8), and a couple of quarters except that one of the quarters I found coming out of the Shop-Rite so maybe that doesn’t count. The quarters were not without a certain distinction … one was a 2000 South Carolina quarter, and one was a bicentennial quarter 1976-1776.
Two of the pennies were so battered that the dates were totally obliterated, but the rest could be read. If you think that the found pennies were ones most recently minted you would be partly right … 25 were minted in the 90’s, and the year 2,000 had the most with 5, a few shiny and unmarred. Every year in the 90’s was represented except 1995. Six pennies came from the 80’s, three from the 70’s, and one was dull and neglected for more than a quarter of a century … dated 1966.
Liddy and I agreed that when the found money reached $1 we would use it to buy a lottery ticket. We don’t buy lottery tickets, succumbing to the weight of several million to one odds against winning, fully aware of, but rejecting the irrefutable logic that "somebody has to win." The found money total is up to $1.67, and we have yet to buy our ticket … I don’t know what we are waiting for … we both have the feeling that somehow the odds will fall in our favor if we gamble with found money. After all, what were the odds of finding 37 pennies, to say nothing of the dimes and quarters?
There is something about finding money that gives you an odd feeling of well being. It’s like you feel that no matter what kind of difficulty you might encounter, it’s a sign that everything will turn out okay. I once found a 20 dollar bill standing in a long, slow-moving line at Disney World in Orlando. Liddy found a five dollar bill in a parking lot in Hershey. We watched a movie about this guy in South Philly who found more than a million dollars in a canvass bag that fell off a truck heading for Atlantic City. He got in big trouble when it turned out that it was gangster money and they wanted it back.
But we don’t have to worry, nobody is going to come looking for a few beat-up pennies, dimes, and quarters. So for now those many pennies rest in a small jar on my desk, flooding the room with good luck, wondering like us what piece of good fortune lies ahead.
And the answer is: more found money … a 2 colones coin on our second day in Costa Rica, about two thirds of a penny. And get this … a 20 dollar bill on the path to Joe Estuki Road in Monteverde. Liddy, heads up as usual, walked right past it, and Mike Pope, our nephew down from Indiana for a visit, a step behind, picked it up. Liddy is happy for Mike, but miffed that she missed it; if it had been a penny she would have spotted it right off.
This story never ends. Back in New Jersey at the end of March we renew our daily walks. Liddy found a 2000 penny walking back from the Nail place on Monday, and today, the fourth day of the fourth month, we found five pennies, two minted in 2000, the others in 1997, 1987, and 1980. So it’s now 43 found pennies and wondering if it means anything.
Like I said, this story never ends. On August 16, 2002 I inventoried the found money jar. Results: 261 pennies, 26 nickels, 77 dimes, 15 quarters – total $15.36. One day in July we found twenty seven dimes scattered around a spot where a side street opened onto Fishpond Road, I think that was the same day we saw a Kildeer wandering on a reservoir wondering where the ocean had gone.
So here it is the last day in November and since August, here is the new count – 76 pennies, 4 nickels, 10 dimes, 5 quarters, and get this . . . drum roll, please, just last week a $1 bill . . . $4.19 since August and a grand total $19.55 in the last two years. Stay tuned.