Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist

Author:Shauna Niequist [Niequist, Shauna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-310-31694-7
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2007-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

pennies

I collect champagne flutes, because I love to celebrate, and I collect pennies. I started doing it in college, right around the time that people kind of stopped using them. That bothered me, I guess, so now I keep pennies. And like with anything you’re looking for, or anything you collect, the more aware you are of them, the more you see.

It’s like when you’re engaged, or, even worse, about to be engaged, and your ability to spot diamonds is sharper than a jewel thief’s. You can be walking through a restaurant and get to your table and say, “Honey, on our way in, I saw an emerald cut, about three quarters of a carat, a princess, and a cushion cut, and our server’s ring is platinum, not white gold.” And your boyfriend is like, “Mmmmm. Do I smell wings?”

I started to see pennies everywhere — in the backs of drawers, under the couch cushions, at the sticky bottom of the center console of cars. There are always a few, along with bobby pins and ticket stubs, in the purses that aren’t used every day. You find them when you need that particular purse for a particular occasion. And then you move them to some other random place. They collect, of their own accord, it seems, on windowsills and in jacket pockets and on kitchen counters.

Before I started collecting pennies, I used to throw them away, along with gum wrappers and used Kleenex. No one accepts them anymore, really. I keep hearing that they’re going to take them out of circulation. Bank tellers glare at me when I try to hand them several hundred and ask for dollars and quarters instead. The man at the Mexican restaurant where I eat doesn’t want them. I get the same thing every time. It always comes to $6.04. Six-oh-four. I hand him six or a ten or a twenty and then dig in my pockets for the pennies, but he shakes his head. No pennies, no.

I went through a toll booth once and paid the whole thirty-five cents with pennies. My friend and I giggled as I threw them in the basket one by one (plink plink plink) and the cars behind me honked. When I worked at a little surf shop in junior high, at the end of the day, we would balance the register to the cent, to the penny. But no one does that anymore.

All of a sudden, the loss of these pennies seemed tragic to me. So I started collecting them, in a pale blue bowl that my cousin Georgia gave me for Christmas. I sort them out of the more substantial silver coins in my pocket and set them in their new place, the smooth blue bowl. I don’t know what I will do with them, but there is something satisfying about watching their numbers grow, a little army of copper coins. It soothes me to think that if there is a place for them, then there is a place for everything.

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