Little Coins and Little Stamps

It may seem partially anal-retentive and partially passive-aggressive to the uninitiated, but when it comes to postage and coinage, I’ve developed some important rules in my life regarding same.

I’ve blogged about many of these rules in the past.  If I get an old dollar bill in my change, I’ll “take it out of circulation” and save it in a special folder in my house with other old currencies.  If I have loose change in my pocket, I’ll put it in one of two souvenir coin banks – the green bank for American currencies, the red bank for Canadian coinage – and when the green bank is full, I take it to a CoinStar machine and convert the loose change into an Amazon.com gift certificate or an iTunes gift card.

I’ll keep a few old, corroded coins around just as “lottery scratchers.”  Probably goes back to the day when I had a lucky penny.  That lucky penny’s long gone by now.  Probably in some old spinster’s coin jar in Wyoming or something.  If I see any of those souvenir penny-flattening machines, I’ll throw some old corroded coins into them and get some nice elongated zinc-copper souvenirs.

At one time in my life, I didn’t even need a penny-smashing machine – not when I had a railroad chugging right past my grandparent’s house on Kenwood Avenue in Slingerlands.  Yep, I put a couple of old pennies on the railroad track – the train zipped over them, and I had some ultra-flat copper slugs as souvenirs.  I also got a stern lecture and a swatted bottom for playing near the railroad tracks at such a young age.

I’ll still pick up coinage that was left on the ground – doesn’t matter if it’s heads-up or tails-up, the coin still costs the same.  Sometimes I’ll look at the coin’s date – especially if it’s a “wheat-back” penny, maybe a 1909 SVDB survived for over 100 years in circulation and here it is on the ground.  Yeah, right.

As for postage, I’ve got simple rules for that as well.  I keep two booklets of first-class “Forever” postage near my computer tower at home.  I also have a booklet of first-class postcard postage, just in case I need to send a postcard somewhere.  If I need more postage than that, I’ll go to the post office and let them put metered postage on my mail.  I don’t need to lather my mail with dozens of tiny single-amount postage that adds up to a final total.  Went through that once when I was married. Won’t go through that again.

That’s not to say that I don’t have the utmost respect for philatelists and numismatists – coin collecting and stamp collecting are two of the biggest and most popular collecting hobbies out there.  My Grandma Betty tried to get me into coin collecting, just like my ex-wife Vicki tried to get me involved in stamp collecting.  Couldn’t do it.  Besides, I was too much into record collecting at the time.  Hee.

Sometimes I think about whether I’d ever use coins or stamps in art projects.  I remember at one point in time there was a bar on Central Avenue called the Copper Penny; the bar’s counter was covered with Lucite-coated copper pennies – all manufactured before 1982, when the U.S. Mint changed the formula for pennies from predominantly copper to predominantly zinc.

And if I ever did use stamps in an art project, I’d be more likely to incorporate Christmas Seals or S&H Green Stamps in the artwork, partially because they’re more plentiful and easier to attain, and partially because I don’t feel like wasting postage.  Besides, you know what happens if you put too much postage on an envelope?  It travels past its intended destination and lands in the next state.  RIMSHOT!

I also remember those days when I had to deal with tokens.  I still have a CDTA bus token from ages ago.  Probably can’t use it, even if I wanted to.  I remember having to purchase bi-metallic toll tokens for use on the Garden State Parkway – you know, that road that allows you to travel 65 mph for about 10 minutes, and then you stop to pay a toll?  Har.

We’ve moved toward a more electronic currency; we pay for things with our debit cards; we mail things with prepaid postage.  And in time, we’ll probably get rid of the humble penny and round our prices up to the nearest nickel.  Just like we’ve gotten rid of most specific-denominated stamps.

This is what we go through as part of our forward progress, I guess.

Whatever that’s worth.  Even if it is still a penny for your thoughts, or a little postage for your heart.