Penny for Your Thoughts

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by Lou Jasikoff

My hobby of collecting pennies started at an early age and started innocently enough. My parents were born and raised in New York City, Lower East Side, 7th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues, to be exact—different times, and different eras, for sure. Growing up, Mom's apartment was quite spacious, especially compared to my Dad's. 

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Getting to the apartment where my Dad grew up required climbing straight up four flights of stairs, so steep that even as a young kid visiting my grandparents, it caused me to huff and puff. There was no elevator. The apartment was small, and I mean tiny: two bedrooms, a small living room, a little kitchen, and no bathroom. The bathroom was in the hall and shared by the two other families who lived on the same floor.  

My two aunts shared one bedroom, my Dad and uncle shared the other, and my grandparents had the living room. Dad's room was just large enough for two beds and a dresser. That was it. My Dad kept his collectibles in a shoebox-type carton in the bottom drawer of the chest. One of those collectibles was a halfpenny first minted in 1793, and the last was in 1857.

One of the questions I always had when I looked through that box of collectibles when I was young was, why didn't my father save more halfpennies? I questioned this mainly because they no longer mint this type of coin. His response was always the same: "We needed those pennies to pay bills." As I said, different times, different eras.

Now grown, I reasoned one day, the penny would no longer be minted. I didn't want to be asked why I hadn't kept more pennies when I grew older, married, and had children. Lucky enough to have the means to pay my bills, I decided to start saving pennies in earnest for my grandchildren. And so it began, saving pennies, but that's not all!

I decided to pick up one of those giant crayon banks, and before I even had grandchildren started writing notes of encouragement, noting essential family events, and then putting in pennies and nickels. I used the bank as a time machine for them to have at a later date.

Today, I cultivated five of these ongoing time machines, one for each of my grandkids. Others have been filled over time and sealed, each with a grandchild's name on it, and they are to open them on their 21st birthdays.  

What's in them, you ask? I don't even know at this point—a lot of pennies and nickels, that's for sure, but also words of wisdom. What I've written is not only from a grandfather to his grandchildren but from my heart. Among the pennies and nickels are hopes for them to never give up on their dreams, that with hard work, they can accomplish anything they set out to do, respect themselves and others, and enjoy life with all it has to offer.