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all day long you'll have good luck,
give it to a faithful friend,
then your luck will never end
As Mike and I were walking back up our driveway after digging another 6 wheelbarrow loads of wood chips ( phew!) he bent down and picked up a shiny penny lying there.
How it had come there I don't know but I could have dropped it, it could have fallen out of a pocket etc etc.
As we both grew up when a penny actually meant something we always pick them up and put them in a penny jar. Pennies also seem to grow in my change purse although these days spending actually cash is a thing that has been overtaken largely by plastic. When I get a purse of coins full I load them in the penny jar.
An English penny was something you couldn't miss as it was big and heavy. Many candies (sweeties) could be bought for a 1d. It counted for so much that there even were two smaller coins, a halfpenny 1/2d and a farthing 1/4d. So when we were kids we collected all the small coins and felt we were really rich . If we collected 12 pennies we then had a shilling.
So what's a shilling? A shilling was a shiny silver coin and worth 12d. 1s=12d. Not 10 but 12 you notice. This led to complications at school and in arithmetic ( it wasn't called math then).It got even more complicated as 20 shillings were collected into pounds, £1. However pounds were paper money so we rarely saw those as kids. You had to learn the complicated conversions back and forth 12d=1s, 20s= £1 and when I became a teacher it was really hard to teach especially as the metric change was just about coming in when old money had to be changed to new money and new conversions had to be taught. A penny then became new pence.
So a few memories came to light brought up with picking up a penny and not a true penny at that.- a cent. Must be a lucky day.
All day long you'll have good luck.
See a penny leave it there,
bad luck comes! So beware
So it seems you'd better pick it up- pennies or cents as luck is hanging on the action.
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It's funny the things that can trigger memories your plog certainly does that especially going back for me. My most unfavourite thing was
ReplyDeleteMath couldn't make head. or tail of it. When it came to learning
Bout money though I was brought up with a lot of respect for it.
To this day I will almost (as John says) sooner get killed than let
a penny lay on the street and walk past it! We don't have as big of a
pile as your in you pot. but, now the Canadian penny is defunct I a,
wondering what to do with them! good story ice seeing old coins.