One night, I went out to bring the garbage to the dumpster, and spotted something round and shiny on the ground, approximately the size and shape of a penny.
Well now, I'm poor. I know the value of a penny. A penny is a shiny metal object that is frequently thrown away in the parking lots of gas stations, or dropped irreverently on the floor of any number of shopping establishments. High school students throw pennies at each other in rituals denoting power and wealth. College students drop them off the tops of buildings to see what will happen. Neil tosses them in the street; I think because he supposes they weigh down his pockets. And I pick them up. All of them. Even the eroded ones. Even the Canadian ones.
When I still lived in Binghamton, I collected pennies for the sake of having coffee at Denny's with Aaron. Other times, I collected pennies for the sake of buying cigarettes at the Hess Mart down the street. If a pack of cigarettes cost $3.89, and you only had $3.85, and four stupid cents is standing between you and your nicotine fix, you're wishing REAL hard that you'd picked up those pennies the high school students were throwing at each other as you passed them on your way to work. Hess Mart people were usually kind of nice. Chevron people aren't always so nice. And really, if it comes down to Generic Pieces of Crap versus Camels because of a few cents..... You see my point, I suppose.
The last time I went to the store, pennies were the difference between generic chocolate chips and Ghirardelli chocolate chips.
Once, I paid off an accidental overdraft on my bank account with pennies.
A long, long time ago, I saved all of the change I made in tips at my job. All the pennies, nickels, dimes, and usually quarters. I saved them for about a year in a ceramic jar labelled "COFFEE." And after about a year, I rolled them, traded them in for bills at the bank, and bought plane tickets from Binghamton to Seattle. Round-trip tickets. And I still had enough left over to have a really cool ten-day vacation.
So, you see, I know the value of pennies.
I almost always pick them up.
So, out by the dumpsters, I set down the garbage sack and stooped -- with a small amount of groaning -- to pick up the penny.
Except, once I got down there, I discovered it wasn't a penny at all, but a fucking leaf. A LEAF! One of those tiny little almost-round leaves. It was yellowish-gold, and it was shiny in the dim light because it had rained earlier that day.
I don't know if I was more disappointed, or disgusted. How dare a leaf mimick a penny like that? I was all excited, too. Dammit.
But then I thought about it...
And wondered: what exactly, makes a penny more valuable than a leaf?
Well, probably something about the economic law of supply and demand... Probably something about scarcity -- there are more leaves than there are pennies. Probably the fact that a leaf won't buy you a Big Mac and an order of fries -- not even a very, very large quantity of leaves.
But then again, what makes a Big Mac superior to a large quantity of leaves?
After all, if you have a large enough quantity of leaves, you can jump in them and kick them at your friends. And if you have a rake, you can pile them all back up and jump in them many, many times.
A Big Mac is basically just a piece of food-like crap that one ingests on a singular occasion in a brief period of time. Indeed, a Big Mac can take the place of sustenance, and indeed, the point of sustenance is to keep one alive.
But really, what's the point of being alive if you have no leaves to jump in? Why BOTHER sustaining life if one spends his or her life watching soap operas and thinking up new things to produce and consume?
Leaves are FAR more useful than people give them credit for.
And yes, I am serious. Mostly serious anyway.
I didn't pick up the leaf that I'd initially thought was a penny. Mostly because, in my disappointment, I'd walked away from it, and by the time I'd thrown the garbage out, and realized the usefulness of leaves, I'd lost the location of that leaf.
But, as I was walking back to the apartment, I became very, very aware of the presence of my daughter. I think she must have been squirming a little bit. But mostly, it was a kind of mental connection that I felt with her.
And it occurred to me for one of the first times in my adult life, that the so-called economic "laws" are mostly bullshit.
Oh REALLY, Helena?
Yes, really. Think about it... If something's a "law," isn't pretty much everything supposed to adhere to it? But children, especially babies and very young children, do not adhere to economic laws -- at least not until their parents teach them those laws. Young kids are WAY more likely to pick up a cool feather than a twenty-dollar bill.
I very much look forward to having my daughter teach me these things again. Apparently I have forgotten them from my own childhood. After hundreds and hundreds of hours of college classes on systems of values, I have completely forgotten the basics.
But I intend to learn again.
~Helena*