2002-07-19 - 10:05 p.m.
Black cats don't scare me, and I'll walk under a ladder, provided a bucket of paint isn't about to fall. I don't throw salt over my shoulder, or knock on wood. But I do have one little personal superstition. It has to do with pennies. I learned the little rhyme when I was a child: Find a penny, pick it up. All the day you'll have good luck. And I don't think I ever attached more significance to it than other things I learned..... except that I always did pick them up, because....well.... I am a person who picks things up. My superstition about picking up pennies really came into being much later, when I was an adult.
I was going through a hard time financially when I first moved here to State City. Because I had a job (albeit low paying) in an upscale area, the first people I got to know were rather well off, and quite simply, I was impressed. I started going out with them to places I couldn't afford and trying to hide the fact that I was struggling. One night we were in a restaurant and when I stood up, I accidently knocked my purse over and all the change spilled out of it onto the floor. A lot of change. Because I used to throw all my change in the bottom of my purse and then fish it out when there was too much month left at the end of the money. All my friends with their American Express Cards in their wallets laughed and laughed. And they said, "Oh, just leave it. Won't the cleaning people have fun tomorrow." I was embarrassed, of course, and played it off. But later I saw that incident as a minor moment of truth because I later found out the fast crowd was not for me. And realized what a pathetic sort of thing it is to pretend to be someone you are not. So I went back to being a person who would stop to pick up her change. A person who takes care of the little things.
Now whenever I see a penny on the ground, it seems like a reminder from the universe, perhaps a sign. Heads up is luckiest. I pick it up and put it in my right hand pocket. And the superstitious little corner of my soul believes that if I ever get to the point again where I feel that I don't need to pick up a penny, then something bad might happen. But mostly I just think of it as a reminder to look for little gifts and surprises in life. A reminder not to become so sure of your story that you destroy your own magic.
In the early days of my relationship with Skootie when we were beginning to realize that what we had was more than friendship, I went out for a walk one evening to think things over. I found a penny. And another and another. There were pennies in the park and on the sidewalk and on the street. I came home with a whole pocketful of pennies. And somehow I knew it was going to work out.
So it was 104 degrees here today. The kind of heat that makes your skin sting when you go out in the sun. And the natives were restless. Then a big storm blew up, and I skidded through a stop sign on rain-slick streets. (No accident, luckily.) But I am looking forward to a productive weekend. Because I have no major committments, and plan to start some new art project. And because, well.... I found a shiny new penny today, heads up, and have it here in my right hand pocket.
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