Find a Penny, Pick It Up

©2014 by John LaTorre

I have been accused of overthinking things. I plead guilty.

For example, I had lunch a few weeks ago with my wife and some in-laws at a Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie said: 

Simple? For anybody else, possibly. But not for me.

"Well,” I thought, “Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds me that the sun is a star. So should I go and wish upon that as soon as I go outside? Or should I accept the more common reference to stars as suns that are many, many light-years away, and wait until evening? And if I do, and end up wishing on the evening star, which isn't actually a star but the planet Venus, will my wish be null and void?" This is the sort of thing that worries me. Of course, most of the people I know are not at all worried about this sort of thing. Instead, they worry that I worry about this sort of thing.

I encountered a similar conundrum when I discovered a penny lying on the driveway in my back yard. Ordinarily, I would have just picked it up. There's a saying that goes: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck.” I can always use a little luck. Even if I don't get any luck, at least I'll be one penny richer.

(This begs the question of whether picking up a penny is worthwhile anymore. The columnist Cecil Adams was asked about that once. He did some calculations, and reported in his column that, if it takes you five seconds to pick up a penny, you are paying yourself at the rate of $7.20 an hour. So it all comes down to how much you value your time. This is an important fact, as you will see.)

As usual, things got complicated once I tried to grasp the Whole Picture. The penny was lying there face-down. I was recently informed that the penny must be facing up if it is to give you any luck. If you don't see Abe, you must not pick it up. What you are supposed to do is turn it over for the next person to find, and that person will be rewarded for your efforts. That hardly seems fair now, does it?

This new wrinkle puts an entirely different slant on things. For one thing, it takes exactly the same amount of effort to reach down and turn over the penny as it does to pick it up and pocket it. Since half the pennies you encounter on the street can be expected to be tails up and therefore unpocketable, your hourly rate for picking up pennies drops to $3.60 an hour, making an unattractive wage even less attractive.

And there's another issue here. The penny was in my back yard. If I don't pick it up, but merely turn it over, who is going to pick it up? My wife? Not likely. My wife is not the kind of person who notices something like that; she takes little notice of anything smaller than a house-cat, unless it is moving. The guy who comes in once a week to cut the grass in the back yard? He missed it the last time he last cut the grass, and probably countless times before that. (Or maybe he prefers to work at a wage of over $3.60 an hour.) How many chances am I expected to give him before I declare the penny fair game for me?

I don't know when this heads-or-tails variation of “find a penny” sprang into existence. I never heard of it when I was growing up, but several people have assured me that it goes back at least to their childhoods. “This calls for more research,” I declared. I fired up the computer, but the Google results left me more confused than ever. I learned that there are regional variants. In the American south, it's said that if the penny is found heads-up, it goes in your pocket, but if it's found tails-up, it goes into your shoe. (If you are in the South and wear open-toed sandals, you may be in trouble.) In other places, it appears that not picking up the penny will bring you bad luck, regardless of whether it's heads or tails. Still other variations specify that you must give the penny away in order to receive the good luck. “Give the penny to a friend, and your luck will never end,” the incantation reads. So now other people are required in order for the magic to work. No wonder people these days are confused and stressed out.

I'm sure that this is the true reason why Canada and Australia and New Zealand have abolished the penny. There is some talk of discontinuing the penny here in the United States of America. It won't be soon enough for me. As for the argument from the penny-pushers that everything that costs ninety-nine cents now will cost a dollar, I think there's nothing to worry about. The only reason that prices end in ninety-nine cents is to make them appear cheaper. That won't change, so what is now $9.99 will not be re-priced at $10.00; it will be re-priced at $9.95. (It will also be twenty percent smaller, but that would have happened anyway.) This change seems to have already taken place in those countries that have abolished the penny. And their citizens are now blissfully free from the burden of picking up pennies, or not picking them up, or turning them over, or giving them away, or whatever inane variation happens to be holding sway in their neck of the woods. It remains to be seen whether the tradition will be transferred to some other coin of low value, like the nickel or whatever the hell they use over there. I surely hope not.

As for my penny in the back yard, I turned heads-up and left it there. After the lawn-mower guy failed to notice it yet again, I retrieved the penny and put it in my pocket with my other six pennies. And then I realized that I was supposed to pass the penny on to a friend. But which of the seven pennies was it? Does it matter? And is that luck-passing business only true in those areas where that variation is in effect? I would have taken all seven pennies out of my pocket and attempted to give them to friends, on the grounds that they were only pennies, after all. But I have come to know the look that crosses their faces when I do stuff like this. I told you how they worry about me.

So I guess I'll have to leave these pennies surreptitiously around the houses of my friends. So, guys, if you come across a penny in some unexpected place, you'll know where it came from. If I were an evil person, I would leave it tails-up and subject you to all my recent agonies, which you won't be able to avoid since, having read this far, you already know what the rules are. But I'm not, so I won't.