I’m going to be squished!

This same thing happened to my friend Roman. When it was over, he was almost as big as a G-Man and thin as a fingernail. His copper colored insides were squished out over the edges where his 118 ridges used to be. When it was over, the kid who did it looked at Roman and laughed, put him in his pocket along with a used mint and a railroad spike. When his mom found them before she did laundry, all three were thrown out, though I think Roman was stuck to the mint.

Usually, people do this to me, or those just like me. Roman was worth ten of me, and he never let me forget it. Roman, which is easier to say than Ro-Man which is short for the face on his front side, is disciplined and proud, as all Romans are. He gazes off to the Left as G-Man and TJ do, but where TJ is shy, and G-Man is a bit of a know-it-all, Roman is proud that he is worth ten. “Ten”, he would remind us, “is the basis for all numbers and math. You”, he said as he pointed to TJ, “are five, and that’s a silly number”, and TJ would look glum. “And you”, he said as he pointed at G-Man (though he didn’t have hands, so his attempt at pointing always made me giggle), “Don’t make me laugh”, he would say as he laughed, “twenty-five is an absurd number!” But G-Man would clear his throat and remind him that he was used in most things. Phones, slot machines, arcade games, candy machines, you name it, and everyone would stop to pick him up from the ground. Poor shy TJ wouldn’t say much, and I would just look the other way. One may be an important number, but no one picks me up anymore. Penny arcades are gone, penny loafers are out and penny slots are there just because no one wants to lose a G-Man. A Penny For Your Thoughts? It seems that now a penny won’t buy much thinking. And now what has happened to Roman is going to happen to me, though I guess I should have expected it. We are usually the ones that get squished on a rail. That is the fate of many of my brothers and one of my deepest fears.

It was a slow moving East bound freight train grinding around the twisty curves that separate the hills between Bakersfield and Mojave. At one point the tracks do a complete circle and the trains loop over themselves. There is a small rock outcropping near a hill, and that’s where the people gathered to watch me squish. That’s what it felt like, anyway. In truth, I don’t think anyone cared except for the boy who placed me on the track. The other big people, dressed smartly in flannel shirts with railroad emblems watched the train lumber around the loop. Closer. Toward me. Perhaps if they had seen what I have seen in the past fifty years, if they were there when history was unfolding in the most unexpected of places, maybe they would be interested in what I have to say. If I could talk to them, that is, but most people do not listen, though some children do. If someone, anyone would listen, maybe I could live. Maybe…

I could see the train cars which were a bunch of flat cars with metal containers stretch from a lower tunnel around a big circle and loop over itself. From a distance, the cars looked like busses and it made me think of my first bus ride, and though I have been on many busses in my life, I remember this one the most.

In 1955, a bus ride was one Ro-Man. They get all the fun, but Rosa Parks, thinking I was a Roman almost grabbed me by mistake. She used the Ro-Meister, as I had come to call him while we were in her change purse to pay the fare. It wasn’t long before I heard some yelling, and I think she got fingerprinted. This was the first time I was really confused about people. Apparently, some guy named Jim Crow had a bunch of laws named after him that gave some strange rules for how people should separate themselves which made about as much sense as there being a rule that said I could not share a pocket with a TJ.

If I had hands, I would cover my ears. The boy is eyeing me and smiling and my face is pointed toward the oncoming train. He could have at least faced me the other way, but I can see the headlight rounding the corner…

That headlight made me think of a movie projector, and the first movie I ever went to. I have been to lots of movies and I have been in lots of pockets in my life, but never the pocket of a person who would one day become the president. It was 1957 and while some people were home watching I Love Lucy, I got to go to the movies with an actor. He was going to his own movie premiere, “Hellcats of the Navy”. I think Nancy Davis was there too, though she would eventually change her name to Nancy Reagan. I was young and shiny then with no dings, and although I thought the movie was a bit silly, I remember Ronald Reagan pulling me and some of my friends out of his pocket and handing me to a person who went to buy some popcorn for the actor.

Until now, I had always considered my fate to be better than the fate of the popcorn. At the time, I found myself a bit jealous of the brightly colored others, and I said, as I was being traded for some popcorn, “Ro-Man, it must be nice to be so shiny and worth ten”, and he said to me “A-Bee Baby, at least you were never swallowed”. Good point, I thought, and from then on, I was glad to be the color I was with A-Bee up front and some wheat on my back side.

I have been in lots of theaters and auditoriums, and traveled all over the world. More than most people. More than this train. I was traded for all sorts of things and sometimes I was not traded for anything. Sometimes I was just given away. I remember in 1957 in New York when the music of Elvis Presley and Nat King Cole would fill the airwaves, there was a series of meetings in a place called Madison Square Garden that went on every night for 4 months. They would pass a plate and people would put my friends on it, and I was put on too. There was a person up front, a guy named Billy Graham, and I’m glad now that I listened to what he had to say. He once spoke of a very valuable coin that he compared to heaven. I would like to meet that coin. I bet he wouldn’t be laying on some track. But, just maybe, I can think about that message from Billy Graham and find some hope while I wait for my end. I have heard many people say over the years that life is so unfair and many of those have not been laying on a train track. Now, maybe I can finally agree that life is unfair, but the truth is, I have lived for over half a century and today is the only bad day I have ever really had. One bad day in over eighteen thousand is not an unfair ratio. Don’t get me wrong. I have been sad and I have been afraid before. I have been alone and I have grown old and overlooked, but I understand what Billy Graham was speaking about. I have learned from that coin that life can be pretty special if only you remember to look.

As I think about what I have seen, I know I don’t have it all that bad. I will be thinner and will be able to fit into all the clothes I had when I was first minted in Denver. I remember in 1963 I was in a pocket of a guy who flew a plane for the president. I heard some talking, and since it’s the president and all, I listen. He was speaking to some other guys with a translator, and they were looking at a big ugly concrete wall being built through Berlin dividing a whole country into two parts. Some people were free, and some were not. It was a long time before I found myself in captivity but perhaps not being free is a bit like being tossed into a wishing well. Someone thinks they are doing a good thing, but all you do is turn green.

One month after my plane ride to Berlin on Air Force One, I was again in Washington and someone threw me into a huge pond that stands in front of my namesake. I always get a bit misty when I see the Lincoln memorial, and my younger brothers who were born in 1959 and beyond all carry a picture of the memorial on their heinies. I missed the pond and was able to sit on the concrete lip of the pool and hear a speech with the words “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ ”, and I remember Martin Luther King well, and I think he knew the lady who gave me my first bus ride and smudged me with the fingerprint ink. After listening to his speech, for the first time I didn’t feel like I had less importance than a G-Man. Just because he is worth twenty-five and I am worth one doesn’t make him better, only different.

I didn’t go in Air Force One again, but in my travels around the country in pockets and purses, about three months later I found myself in Dallas. This time, I was on a counter at the Parkland Memorial Hospital, Louie Louie was playing on a transistor radio, when it seemed like the world ended. A mean person did something very bad to a man I knew. I recognized the man they wheeled in as the same one I flew to Berlin with and who looked at that big ugly wall. I am not sure why people are mean to each other, but sometimes they are. Kids who put us on tracks do not do it out of meanness, but rather out of curiosity. People who hurt others are not just curious. They are mean. I think the person who shot John Kennedy was mean, and five years later I saw it again. In 1968, “Hey Jude” was on the radio and I was in one of those freebie coin bowls at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. I never see G-Men or Romans there, though I often see shy TJ’s and lots of my brothers in them. I heard a gunshot, and the same man who had a dream would have no more dreams. I guess others would have to dream for him.

I wonder if I will dream. I have enjoyed my life. I have been traded for a lot of things, both odd and normal in places both exciting and mundane. Before I landed in a wishing well in 1969, I was at Woodstock and I have no idea what I was traded for there. The same thing happened at a Grateful Dead concert. Come to think of it, while listening to Purple Haze at a Jimmy Hendricks concert, I… Well I don’t quite remember, but now, laying on a rail, I can see the train rounding the bend. Help me if you can, but I look at boy who is only curious, and my thoughts glide back again to 1965. I am still East, and again in New York and I am being traded for a small paper glass of some black sugary stuff at a very LOUD concert by a group from Liverpool. I was at Shea Stadium and the Beatles were playing. They did twelve songs in about a half an hour, and I could barely make out any of the songs because the crowd was so loud. They were even louder than an Elvis show. Oddly, I now remember the second to last song they played. “Help” now seems to fit. I teased a brand new G-Man next to me, about the song “Can’t buy me love”, considering they think they are so good and all, but he was one of the new ones, just minted that year, and he had some of what I was made of on his insides. Last year, he was all silver, and now he looked like a copper sandwich. I told him so, and I think he cried and I got payback because after Memphis, I was thrown into a wishing well in 1969 by a guy named Neil Armstrong. He can go to the moon, for all I cared, because I spent a year under water turning green before someone rescued me and took me to a football game in Buffalo, New York where I saw the Juice play. I was traded a few times there only to be thrown off a building.

When the wheels of a train slip on a rail, they make a very loud shrill howling sound that has kept me up many nights when I lived with people who rode the rails. Since so many of my brothers have met the end by trains, it seems fitting that we learn as much as we can about these things, just as bugs must learn all they can about windshields, not that it does them any good.

The wheels are making the track squeal, and I can feel the high pitch vibrations in my wheat side. The train is too close for anyone to get me now, and I can see the hand of the boy held by one of the big people in the flannel shirts and matching railroad emblems as if in the child’s excitement he may run toward the train. Still, there is something familiar about that man and his son. It stirs a memory. Perhaps I am reminded that it is nice to be loved and protected. I remember when I was loved…

I had spent a year under water before I was fished out of the well and saw a football game. The guy at the game who finally had me in his pocket was a construction worker and he thought it would be fun to throw me off the top of a new building that he and his crew had just finished. It was New York, 1970, and the first of two very tall buildings were just completed and so he took me to the top of the World Trade Center and threw me into the wind. It was a long fall. I think it took about 25 seconds and during that time the wind turned me end over end and this stuff called terminal velocity kept my speed to about 40 or 50 miles per hour. Had I hit someone, he would have only been irritated.

The guy that I hit was irritated, in fact, but he saw what I was, and since it had been twelve years since my kind were minted, he took me to his home in California.

He was a kindly man who held me in his hand and gave me a good bath in some sort of citric acid solution that tasted like lemon juice and something else. I wasn’t shiny, but I was clean. He had pictures of steam locomotives on his wall. Great big black locomotives with Union Pacific painted in white letters on the sides. These monsters had giant crushing wheels with cattle catchers on the front that looked like hideous teeth and smoke belching from the top, and after seeing those pictures, I had nightmares for several years.

The kindly man with no taste in art gave me to his son and told him to take care of me. He told the boy that I might be worth something someday, and showing him my backside with the wheat, he said that my kind were not made anymore. So, the boy put me in a small slot in his belt where the leather folded over just enough to hold me in place. There I stayed for the next four years, loved.

He went to an elementary school in Yorba Linda, California. Then, it was a small town not far from a place in Anaheim where every night they would shoot off fireworks and we would watch them, and sometimes he would take me out of the belt and hold me up so I could watch. We once went to that place in Anaheim that had Mickey and Donald, and he and his parents bought books of tickets so we could ride the rides, though the best rides used the best tickets, and those were called “E Tickets”. We would always come home with extra A and B tickets because no one wants to ride the kiddy rides because waiting in those lines takes time away from the cool E ticket rides, like the Matterhorn.

He would show me to his friends and draw pictures of me, and lay paper over me and lightly color with a pencil to make a tracing. Once, he took a small file and made a mark, very slightly on my right side just in front of my nose so I could be distinguished from the others, but he always put me back in his belt when he was finished.

His school, called Richard M Nixon Elementary School had a small house on the edge of the playground where Nixon was born. I have heard the school was torn down and a library was put up in its place when Nixon died. The timing was interesting because it happened to be that year that Nixon was again elected president. It was 1972, American Pie would play from the radio of our school bus and Nixon was running against George McGovern and at the school, if the kids could vote, they would pretty much have to vote for Nixon. I remember something that even now makes me sad. The teacher was asking the kids who they would vote for, and the kids all yelled Nixon, of course, and she asked if there was anyone voting for McGovern, and one girl whose skin was about the same color as mine raised her hand, and all the kids laughed, and she cried. But the boy who carried me in his belt didn’t laugh. At lunch, he gave the girl his graham crackers and asked if she would play.

It was around that time I went to see The Poseidon Adventure and met my first Ike. The boy’s dad took us to the movie, and I thought this movie was also a bit silly even though Ronald Reagan was not in it, and his dad gave him a nice shiny Ike, which was worth one hundred of me. Ike and I spoke a little when the boy took me out of his belt to introduce us, and not once did Ike tell me how much he was worth. He was nice. Not proud, though he had reason to be. He was big, and would put Roman to shame, not that he ever tried. I liked Ike, and was a bit in awe, though his brothers were only minted on and off for the next six years. I liked the eagle and the moon on his hind end, though I thought his face looked a bit like Romans.

These were odd times. It wasn’t too long before that time, that myself and 25 or so of my brothers could be traded for a gallon of gas, and it wasn’t many years after that time that it seemed a whole piggybank of my brothers would be needed for a gallon of gas. There were a lot of people who seemed angry over a place called Vietnam and I remember in 1974 when my friend and I were at a family camp, he and I saw on TV President Nixon say that effective immediately, he would resign the presidency.

There was a stunned silence in the room and slowly the people returned to their activities. In my life I have seen people hurt the President and I have seen Presidents do silly things that hurt themselves. It seems like as much fun as people have poking fun at the president, when something bad really does happen, we are all hurt. I don’t like seeing anyone hurt, though I wonder if this train will hurt. The rumbling is getting louder, and frankly, I’m afraid. I can see the brightly colored front end of the Santa Fe Warbonnet locomotive. Being aware of the type of locomotive now is like a bug saying to itself, here comes a windshield of a Ford F 350. Now that bad boy has a torque of … Splat!

I spent four years in the belt of the boy who was about ten when Nixon resigned. I am not sure how it happened, but soon after the people there began talking again, I fell out of the belt and onto the carpet, and I rolled under a heating duct. I watched the boy when he first noticed me missing, and I saw his tears, and I saw him ask his parents and their heads shook, and he asked other big people and their shoulders went up and down, and they walked away as if somehow they had forgotten what it was like to lose something that had value to only them. I heard one say that it is only a penny and she pulled another from her purse and offered it to him, but he ran away trying to hold back his sobs as best as he could. I, on the other hand, did not try to hold back mine.

I spent several weeks under the duct being forced to listen to “The Way We Were”, until a broom found me and I was spotted by a lady who dropped me into a pocket of her dress, and I and a few others were traded for something, and I was given again to someone else as a bonus, and I again bounced around criss crossing the country several times before a man shoved me into a slot in the top of his shoe. I was in his right shoe, a penny loafer, and there I stayed for much of the rest of the decade. Although I enjoyed watching MASH and Mary Tyler Moore, I did not like all the things we did. He would go to places where there was dancing that involved lots of pointing and shuffling and globe things with mirrors that hung from the ceiling and spun around and music with guys in polyester who strained their voices so that they sounded like girls. I think disco alone disproves the possibility that people are evolving.

The shoes of the man went to New York and there on a sidewalk, I fell out. I spent many weeks there and not one of the thousands of people who walked by stopped to pick me up. There was a homeless man nearby who had a sign and nobody stopped to pick him up either even though he was worth far more than I.

Sometimes at the mint, mistakes are made. Sometimes one of my brothers gets stamped twice, or sometimes one gets stamped off center. The mint does its best to find those before they leave, but sometimes, a brother escapes and they are prized by collectors and worth many thousands of what I am worth, and I am not damaged. I see the homeless man next to me, and he is sick, and I see other people who may not have been minted properly, but they are not valued by collectors at all. There seem to be few who value them, and that makes no sense to me. Older coins become more valuable, but older people become less, and I wonder why.

I was on a busy sidewalk in New York next to a very nice, old and valued building where valuable people lived. Ironically, “Another One Bites The Dust” was a popular song, and one night in 1980 I heard a gunshot, and I saw a man stagger inside the building. The man with the gun calmly sat down next to me and said in a matter of fact tone, “I’ve just shot John Lennon”. He put his hand down on top of me, picked me up, looked at me and put me in his pocket before the police arrived. They later removed me from his pocket and I returned to my life being traded for this and that, though it seemed that it took a lot more me and others to trade for the same things. It took a lot more of the flimsy paper as well, though the paper ones never really had a lot to say to us. Anymore, there were small rectangular pieces of plastic that did most of the trading anyway, and my brothers were becoming more left out of the trade. A lot of times, when I was supposed to be given back to a person after a trade, they would wave their hand and point to the little bowl that held others of my brothers. It seemed like I was not even worth one anymore.

Soon after that, I was given to someone after a trade who put did me in his pocket, and after we walked out of a building, I heard another gunshot and we fell. I’m getting tired of hearing gunshots. There was a lot of yelling and as it happened, one of the people who was there once traded me for some popcorn. I was in the pocket of James Brady, and he was shot in the head and he lived, and Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest and he lived too, and I was glad that both lived and fondly remembered twenty four years earlier the first movie I had ever seen. After seeing several people hurt, and one I had known so long ago, I think I needed a rest and thankfully, I was sent into captivity. I was traded to a guy who put me in a big jug.

I don’t know how long I spent in that jug that holds five gallons of water, but it was the jail that held me and a bunch of my brothers as well as a lot of other TJ’s, Romans and G-Men. I could see the TV from where I lived and I became familiar with Saturday Night Live and the Cosby Show and I remembered his stand-up from when I was very young. Our jailor spent many hours in front of a computer on a new thing called the internet. Instead of licking a stamp, he could send a message on this without even having to lick the screen. He listened to music on these shiny things called Compact Discs that looked like a giant Ike, though I don’t think it improved the music. We had to suffer through Wham and Madonna endlessly and I think that was the hardest thing about being held prisoner. On the positive side, we did get to read The Far Side which always made us laugh. From what I could gather from watching TV, there seemed to be a trend of people who wanted to be treated equally, which seemed OK, except that they did it by discouraging some phrases and encouraging others. I don’t think Martin Luther King had political correctness in mind because changing someone’s heart by changing their speech is a little like changing me into a Roman by painting me silver. I have lived what I learned the afternoon near the Lincoln Memorial by recognizing the value in others. I cannot change my heart just by changing what I say.

Then, along comes Aunt-B. I called her that because of the picture on her front side. She was silver colored and worth one hundred of me and had a perpetual frown and no sense of humor. She had odd ridges around her and, to our delight, was often mistaken for a G-Man. She hated being called Aunt-B, and would always correct us, and say her name is Ms. Anthony. We did tease each other a lot, and when you’re in jail, there is not a lot else to do. She never could take a joke. They stopped making her in 1981 (though started again in 1999), and I was sad to see her go. In spite of her stuffy ways, she kept us in line and always had some nice treats for the kids who were in our jail, and when she made apple pies, well, that was the bees knees. I think she was the first attempt at political correctness by the US Mint.

During the time of my captivity, my thoughts would go back to ten years earlier when I had a home in the belt of the boy who loved me. There is a longing to be loved, and I miss it, though I am here with my friends, I think I was made to be held by people, to be traded, to be needed. My body got darker, and that is something that seems to happen more to me than to the others who are silver in color. The oxygen in the air reacts with the copper in my body, and very slowly, eats me away turning me different colors, but mostly I look a lot older than my younger brothers. In a bowl on a counter, even when we are free, people will often choose a newer one over me even if seconds later they hand it to someone else. It seems like even when I am free, my worth is dropping. Oxidation is terrible, but it happens to all of us.

Because of this, I take chemical reactions seriously, and I think in 1986 something happened that made the world take them a little more seriously as well. There was a big building that made electricity from atoms. It was called a nuclear power plant, and they were all over the world, but this one in a place in the Soviet Union, in a town called Chernobyl, a nuclear plant went kablooie and I think it was a reminder of how dangerous this stuff can really be. I guess almost as dangerous to people as the wheels of a train are to me.

I can see the engineer now, and the conductor sitting on the other side. Neither of them see me, and if they did, I don’t think they would stop. Thinking about this train is not helping me feel better, so I will go back to when I was freed from captivity.

We were held prisoner in a 5 gallon water bottle, and one day our jailor took us to the bank where we were paroled by the banker who counted us and gave the man a bunch of paper as a trade. Perhaps he held the paper prisoner instead. I spent several more years being traded for things, spending time in pockets, in bowls on counters, but my favorite thing was when I went to a store and a parent would put me in a horse so a child could ride. These horses were one of the few things that still allowed me and my brothers inside them. Normally, everything was a G-Man. I would sit inside the metal box with my brothers while I listened to the child laugh and beg for more when the ride was over. Sometimes another brother would drop in with us, and sometimes the mom would say, no honey, it’s time to go and sometimes the child would cry. I knew they were having fun while the horse rocked back and forth, and there is no bigger thrill than being the one who brings happiness to another.

Another time in 1989, listening to “Love Shack”, I was on a shelf with some friends and there was an odd piece of concrete placed next to me. It is usually the kind that gets thrown out, but this one seemed special, and I asked him where he came from, and though his German accent was hard to understand, the piece of concrete told me he was a piece of the Berlin Wall that had just been torn down. I guess the people on the East German side were paroled by someone as well, and I know how they feel. It feels good to be free. I told him I saw him when he was new, and though I thought he would think it good to be a part of history, he only felt ashamed that he was part of something that held so many people captive. I can see his point, but he holds no more responsibility than a hammer holds for driving in a nail.

I spent the next number of years circulating around, though I was needed less and less. More often than not, when I was handed to someone, I would get dropped in a bowl, or carried to a car along with the coffee the person just got and put onto a holder with other brothers along with a Chap Stick, a paperclip and a dust bunny. Paperclips do not ever have anything interesting to say, and no one is dumber than a dust bunny. Sometimes a kid would hold me on edge on a table with one finger and flick me on my side with the other and I would spin like crazy, and though you may think it made me dizzy, it was actually pretty fun. Being played with is always fun. Unless you’re a baseball. They complain of the worst headaches after being hit with a bat, though the bats that I have spoken to seem to enjoy their work. I like deciding who gets to go first, and though you may think heads or tails is totally random, I usually land on the side I want, and often fall for the person who treats me kindly.

I spent much of the 90’s just being traded for things when I was not sitting on a counter being bored and watching Seinfeld. Sometimes a collector would grab me since I was no longer being made. They have funny names for us. They call our faces the Obverse, and our backs the Reverse, but I prefer face and heinee. Heads or Tails works too. Sometimes I would escape from a collector only to be grabbed by another. Once when I was on the run, in 1994, I was in a cup holder with a sticky bottom from spilled sugary liquids of a Ford Bronco with OJ Simpson in the passenger seat holding a gun to his head. It had been almost twenty five years since I saw him play football just before I was thrown off the tall building. They used to call him the Juice. A friend of his was driving, and I had seen enough pain in my life, so I closed my eyes and hoped that he wouldn’t hurt himself. He didn’t and soon I was back being traded. I made my way East, and in 1995 I was in the pocket of a police officer who pulled a man over for not having a license plate, and it turned out that the guy was the one who lit a bomb in front of a building in Oklahoma City. I have seen a lot of mean people, and I think he was the meanest. Some time later, he was executed. Sometimes, there is a price to pay for being mean, though it did not even the scales of what he did. His punishment was simply a consequence for what he did. That was also the first year of a company called eBay.

In 1999, the same year Lance Armstrong won the Tour De France for the first time, I was traded on eBay along with 500 other wheat brothers and we were put in a box and shipped to New York where I sat in a jar on a shelf next to some other friends and a blackened and warped fire helmet. Every few mornings I would watch our captor get up and ready for work and he would return the following morning. He was a nice man who had a nice wife and nice kids who would sometimes play with us. I got spun, and was used for checker pieces, I was used to build pyramids and stacked in all sorts of patterns, I was almost swallowed once, and thought of my friend Roman from 44 years ago and wondered if he ever got over being swallowed. The times in his house were happy times, and soon I did not think of him as my captor. I loved being played with and I was warm at night and there was laughter during the day. The man would come home the morning after he left, often very tired with a blue shirt with the letters FDNY on it and his engine company printed as well. He had a big bushy moustache and a bigger smile as did his wife, except she did not have a moustache.

One morning, he did not come home.

There were over 300 other firemen who also did not come home, and I remember a little more than thirty years earlier being thrown off the top of the building that fell down that day after a mean person flew a plane into it.

There were a lot more things that collapsed that day than some buildings. Lives collapsed, and when he did not return home, I saw a family collapse. There is a difference when a child cries because he cannot ride a horse and when he cries because he will never see his daddy again, and when I remember the tears, my eyes fill as well, and even now, on the track, thinking of that, I am no longer consumed with the train. I know it’s coming, and the sound is deafening, and I am almost under the cattle catcher now, and the tracks are vibrating, the child is watching, and I am thinking the last home I lived in, and when relatives came in and sold much of the fireman’s things, we were sent to a bank, traded, and earlier today I was given to the boy along with some gum when he handed a clerk some paper.

The wheels are here, I am watching, and feeling sorrow for the family, the loss, their grief, ink stained fingers, popcorn, I have a Dream, the boy who loved me, and the track is vibrating and I am shaking like I never have before, and suddenly…

I have fallen off the outside edge of the track and watch the wheels go over my head. I must have been shaken off the track, and the train passes over me and it is now over, and the boy comes over, finds me and looks disappointed that I am not squished. I can hear another train in the distance, and I can see he will not make the same mistake twice. The gum he bought is well chewed and plenty sticky to make sure I do not fall off again, and as he places me again on the track and pulling the gum from his mouth, his dad comes over to see what he is up to. The child points to me, gestures to the gum in his mouth, and the dad smiles and nods, turns away, and stops. He turns around and looks at me. He is bending over, and somehow, I know this man. Somehow he knows me as well. He picks me up and looks carefully and notices the notch in my right side right just in front of my nose, and I see his breath catch and his eyes mist, and I see him smile. I know the face that I have not seen for thirty years, and he knows mine, and I remember his belt with the folds I used to live in that likely no longer fits him, and I know I am home

He listens carefully to my story just as he used to as a boy, and he writes down all I say because my story is no different than other wheat brothers. He draws a picture of me and of all the memories I have had. We all have good stories to share, and everyone does, not just coins. So when you find an old discolored penny, a worn TJ, a scratched Roman or a person with wrinkled skin and grey hair, all you have to do is listen and imagine…

Value comes in the most hidden of places.

And stay away from train tracks.