#19. Penny

 

I walked all of yesterday with a penny in my shoe. The power of the penny was renewed when I reached page 17 of Annie Dillard’s theocracy, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It says “When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburg, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would hide it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write, I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passerby who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe... The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-and this is the point-who gets excited by a mere penny?"

Annie Dillard’s childhood compulsion to hide pennies initiated a compulsion of my own. I can’t help but find pennies, seemingly everywhere now. They appear in empty parking lot spaces and on the floor of a dirty gas station bathrooms and on restaurant tables. I have been compelled not only to see them but to pick them up. I store them in a cleaned out candle tin in my cubicle at work. 

Each time I see a penny cast down and passed up, by who knows how many people, my neurons zap me back to Dillard’s page 17. Will I be a person who gets excited by a mere penny? I so often stray into anxious blindness unable to see the pennies of the mundane. 

That’s why I walked all of yesterday with a penny in my shoe. I needed a reminder, a moment by moment prodding, to look out for the sweet pennies cast broadside into my life. There are pennies to find at all times, even in this year.

Last Fall, I was projecting a particular type of year. I certainly did not anticipate a pandemic or a national awakening to racial injustices. Like many of us, I am experiencing fear, grief, heaviness, hope, exhaustion, rage, and rest. Back in December, I committed to 400 “penny” New Year resolutions. With a nod to the repeating 20s of this year, I mapped out 20 different activities to perform 20 different times. Some activities are ones that already compel me towards living creatively. The remaining resolutions are challenges I typically shy away from. Each resolution at a glance is inconsequential, like a penny, but have become exponentially valuable to me in the turbulence of this year. 

As I approach the halfway point of my project, there is only one resolution I have failed to start. The one is #19. 

Write a blog.

Writing is terrifying to me. I am scared to fail and I am scared to succeed. If I succeed (whatever that means), I am scared to be exposed, to say the wrong thing, to be inarticulate, or even worse boring. I want to be seen, but want to live anonymously. I think that the things I want to write about either won’t be interesting or have already been written by other people. The fear list is long.

In desperate need of an external push to start writing, I turned to Emma Gannon’s skillshare class on silencing self-criticism in creative expression. Toting a bright yellow blouse with an oversized, deep purple collar, Gannon shared numerous ways to generate creative momentum. I cringed the full 43 minutes of the class, knowing that she was the external push I needed. Like a kid taking on the high dive for the first time, I needed to hear the cheers down below, encouraging me to take the leap. All the while I just hoped that Gannon would yell, “This is too high for you right now. You might break all your bones! Just climb back down just the way you came up.” Since you’ve read this far, you know that Gannon deferred my hope.

So this is me plugging my nose and pretending there is a penny at the bottom of the pool that needs saving. Hear that sound? That’s me screaming at the top of my lungs all the way down.

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