Monetary Appreciation

I love handling money. Not the way high-rolling financiers handle it, pushing digits and virtual dollars from account to account and hovering over balances on statements and ticker tapes. But really handling money—touching it, crumpling it, jingling it in my pockets.

There’s something so satisfying about tangible cash. Round metal disks that feel solid in my hand, and rectangles of paper that invite fidgets and folds. Cool heavy quarters. Wafer-thin dimes. Chunky nickels outweighing their penny cousins three to one.

And paper money! Crushable, creasable, waddable, stuffable. I iron it through my fingers, twiddle it into a tube, pleat it with origami zeal. Fresh-from-the-mint greenbacks, still crisp and sticky, call for a hard-fisted crinkle or a taut, noisy snap to make sure I use only one at a time.

Small wonder that my first real job during college was at a savings and loan, where I tallied thousands of dollars a day and balanced my cash drawer to the penny at every close.

This peculiar tactile pleasure started in childhood, when money was tight and handling cash become something I saw as a treat. When I was about six, Bank of America started a campaign to help kids start saving. They handed out big, pink cardboard booklets shaped like a piggy bank. I was so excited when my mom got me one. The booklet had a space for my name on the front and slots for inserting dimes inside. It held about two dollars’ worth—a fortune!—and when I finally filled it with my allowance, I got to start my very own bank account.

I was so proud to have a savings passbook. It was the size of a credit card and navy blue, with rounded corners and narrow lines and tidy, handwritten deposits that the teller always initialed and dated. I used to deposit my birthday and Christmas money each year—two, five, ten dollars at a time. Sometimes I’d ask Mom to cosign a withdrawal so I could buy something I wanted, like a charm for my bracelet or a new hair band. By the time I went to college, I had $1,258 in the account, which paid for a lot of the tuition my first year.

Using actual currency, my mom taught me the art of home budgeting in my early teens. She would cash Ken’s monthly paycheck, and together we would kneel at the side of their master bed while she laid out the money on the puffy patchwork quilt and figured each week’s budget for a family of six. We’d talk about finances as she split the money among envelopes—some for groceries, some for bills, some for clothes, some for gas, some for fun, and some for what-all-else ran a household.

She’d write the amount on the outside of the envelope and subtract amounts she took out every week. Sometimes she’d move money from one envelope to another. She called this “robbing Peter to pay Paul” and did it to make up for changes in expenses, or to carry out a special splurge she hadn’t budgeted for. “Shh,” she’d say, “don’t tell Ken.” Somehow there was always enough, but very little left over.

Counting money was a home ritual in other ways, too. Both Ken and Mom had spent their childhood in times when money was scarce—Ken during the Depression, and Mom during World War II. I also remember Moşu and Grandma (Mom’s parents) talking a lot about the meager days of the Depression. So of course all of them had the habit of saving every bit of loose change to convert to bills later.

Mom and Ken stashed their change in a three-foot-tall Galliano liquor bottle that stood in their bedroom. It was just wide enough at the top to accept a fifty-cent piece, and tapered to about six inches wide at the base. It stood in a wire stand to keep it off the floor and had a brushed-metal spigot at the bottom. Moşu and Grandma had taken several months to drink all the liquor from it and then gave us the bottle for collecting coins.

It seemed to take forever for the bottle to fill up. By the time it was half full, I’d be begging my parents to lug it from the bedroom and let us roll the coins into wrappers.

Shaking out the coins made an awful racket, like a thousand keys jangling on a janitor’s ring. It nearly drowned out the TV. We’d always have a butter knife ready to poke into the neck in case of a jam-up, and then the coins would rain out as if from a Las Vegas jackpot.

With some Saturday Night Movie Special going on in the background, the whole family would sit around the pile of spare change on the living room floor and sort and stack and roll coins as we went. I loved the cheery jingle the coins would make whenever someone raked through them to find a fresh vein of dimes or nickels among all the pennies.

Keeping the coin stacks tidy was important for proper counting, and we’d set out columns in even rows to match the amount that each paper coin-tube could hold: five pillars of ten pennies each, four columns of ten nickels, five stacks of ten dimes, ten piles of four quarters. We’d complete the wrapper rows until we didn’t have enough to make a full roll. The extras went back into the bottle for the next counting.

I liked taking the flat paper wrappers and squishing their sides to make them round. They usually stayed eye-shaped until I got the first coins set, though, which was tricky. When I was little, my fingers weren’t long enough to meet in the middle of the tube, so I learned to set four or five coins at once in the center of the tube first. Then I’d carefully tip in more coins a few at a time. Trying to stuff in a lot at once usually bungled it, and I had to un-jam the coins and start over. I still enjoy the ringing, shuffling sound they make when I can get five or so to flow in at once.

When I’d added the right number of coins, I’d hold the filled roll in front of me with one forefinger in each end of the tube, so I could make sure I had equal amounts of paper to fold over at the ends. Sort of like those Chinese torture tubes, only I couldn’t get my fingers stuck.

We had to write the bank account number on the rolls, too, so the bank could adjust our account if we’d miss-counted our nickels. It was easier to write the number on the tube while it was empty, but I didn’t always remember to do that. Most of the account numbers I wrote down wrapped drunkenly around the roll because I couldn’t write well on the curved surface.

Moşu and Grandma also saved loose change, and they would plan their coin-rolling event for times when we kids would visit them. We’d sit at their big maple dinner table and organize coins on a white tablecloth embroidered with blue and pink cross-stitch flowers. I don’t remember what they saved their coin in, but they didn’t usually have as much to roll at once.

They also had a small collection of really old silver coins stored in a black porcelain bank that looked like an old upright wall phone, the kind they used in 1940s gangster movies and on Green Acres. I used to pretend to dial numbers on it in the den. Sometimes when I visited, they’d let me empty the bank and count all the silver and ask them questions about what was there. I especially liked the Mercury dimes. They were thinner and prettier than Roosevelt dimes; they were real silver and felt old and good in my fingers.

Ken was an avid coin collector, too—near to being a hoarder, actually. Many was the night he would open the huge safe in the master bedroom and tote out his collection of cash to the living room for a recount.

Most of the loose stuff was stored in an olive-green, canvas bank bag that was impressively heavy to my eleven-year-old grasp. The rest was a pile of envelopes, books, and money miscellany.

A dozen clear tubes with screw-top lids held ribbed stacks of quarters rigid. Used orange prescription bottles capped with white would rattle with dimes. Several dark-blue, heavy books opened and opened and opened again to reveal a two-foot strip of cardboard punched with perfectly round holes, each printed with a date and a letter like -S and -D, and most of them plugged with dimes or nickels or pennies.

Ken would sit with us on the floor, a modern-day Silas Marner, and let us kids spill the treasure onto the threadbare brown carpet. The silver slid and rang out merrily into a pile. We would sift through the collection—counting, categorizing, fondling the coins—while he documented the count, described the nuances of numismatics, and impressed upon us the extreme value of these specimens.

He taught us how to quickly recognize silver dimes and quarters from their copper-nickel counterparts by checking the edges for one- or two-metal coloring. I learned that D and S on coins told me the place of minting (Denver or San Francisco) and that no letter mark—a “plain” coin—meant Philadelphia was its source. I soaked in our nation’s history as it’s recorded by its currency, from the first national banking of Revolutionary War times, to the issue of gold and silver certificates, to the Federal reserve notes we use today.

Ken had original two-dollar bills from the Depression, and Indian Head pennies, Buffalo nickels, and Mercury-head dimes in varying states of wear. Heavy Liberty dollars and silver fifty-cent pieces. A Depression-era silver certificate or two, with its identifying blue-inked seal on the front of the note. I came to appreciate currency as art—each coin a sculpted bas relief, each note a finely etched engraving. I still smile when I spot the spider that Ken always pointed out on the face of a one-dollar bill. Was this some engraver’s private joke?

Occasionally, my parents would buy special edition sets, like all the coins minted in one of our birth years, or the whole set of coins struck for the Bicentennial. My favorite one was a slip of cardboard in a plastic sleeve that held a Lincoln penny and a Kennedy half dollar. Between the two coins, a paragraph told all the similarities in their lives and deaths—even the trivia that their full names contained the same number of letters. I took that to show-and-tell one time in sixth grade.

As co-keepers of the collection, all of us in the family were trained to scrutinize every bit of currency that crossed our palms—from sidewalk finds to change given at the grocery store. Wheat pennies (pre-1959) were valuable. Nickels, dimes, and quarters from 1964 and earlier were solid silver and therefore valuable. “Three-liner” twenty-dollar bills—which stated the note was redeemable for lawful currency (gold or silver)—were outdated and thus valuable. Coming upon a 1943 steel penny—the only time they weren’t minted in copper because of war shortages—was like finding the Holy Grail.

Usually all I ever got were wheat pennies and silver nickels, but I checked every coin just the same. I’d bring each find to Ken or Mom, and they’d either pay me the face value and add the coin to the stockpile, or they’d have me save it myself.

Two decades later, after Ken died and his collection was divvied between his two kids, we were all surprised at how small it actually had been. My own vast collection, which I’d started at age ten and increased with silver inherited from Moşu and Grandma, could fit in a shoebox and still leave room for one of the shoes.

In time I wanted to cash in these rare and esteemed coins for the high value they would undoubtedly bring after so many years out of circulation. My whole collection fetched little more than $45, including the special edition sets and my prized Lincoln-Kennedy comparison card. Of my assiduously saved silver nickels, the dealer declared, “They’re still worth a nickel. Spend them.”

Only my tubes of a hundred or so wheat pennies had shown any real appreciation over the years: they had doubled in face value to two cents apiece.