The Canadian Penny

Recently I stopped by Zions Bank in downtown Provo to pick up some foreign currency for a ceramic cookie jar I keep in the living room. It is known and loved by my grandkids as the ‘goodie jar.’ For therein I have stashed all sorts of sugar-sodden items. When they come to visit they may pick one item out of the goodie jar. But lately they have been so quarrelsome about who gets what piece of candy, and so careless in wiping chocolate on my overstuffed chairs, that I decided on a sea change for the little twerps. So I got ten rolls of pennies, five rolls of nickels, two rolls of dimes, and a roll of quarters at my bank in the supermarket. Then I dumped out all the candy and replaced it with the coins. From now on when they visit each grandchild can stick in one hand and pull out as much money as they can grasp.

But I wanted some foreign coins in there, just to mess with their minds (‘it’ll be educational’ I tell myself defensively), so I stopped by the biggest bank in Provo and asked for several rolls of Canadian pennies. The clerk heard my request with blank astonishment, then replied loudly: “We don’t have any Canadian coins. Who would ever use them?”

Who indeed?

Canadian pennies were endemic during my Minneapolis childhood 55 years ago. They somehow seeped across the border and made their way into the cash registers of stores big and small. And they were not worth the peel of an onion. In fact when something proved utterly worthless my parents would growl “That thing isn’t worth a Canadian penny.”

And pennies were real money back in those halcyon days. A postage stamp was only three cents. A fountain drink at Gray’s Drug in Dinkytown was five pennies. And when my allowance ran out in the middle of the week I always chanted the incantation: “Find a penny -- pick it up -- all the day you’ll have good luck” And it usually worked, too -- I’d find a penny or two nestled in the cracks of sidewalks or rolled into a crevasse at an asphalt parking lot.

The shopkeepers were rather hypocritical when it came to Canadian pennies. Harry’s Grocery, on the corner of Como and 19th Avenue S.E., gave ‘em out as change without so much as a by-your-leave. But when you wanted to buy an atomic fireball and tried to give Harry five Canadian pennies he acted like you were trying to sell him a left-handed monkey wrench.

“We don’t take that foreign money here!” he’d snarl at me, barely missing my head with a swipe from his arm extension gripper. The conniving raparee.

And take it from me, just by feel and heft you could never ever differentiate between a good old Yankee penny and a Canuck one. You had to look real close to see if it featured Lincoln or those darn maple leaves.

And the Post Office would not give you a stamp for a birthday card for your grandmother if you proffered Canadian pennies. So the reason you never got that card is not my fault, Grandma -- wherever you are now.

Word on the street was that Canadian pennies were not even good for fixing the blown ceramic fuses that were so common in household basements back then -- at least in my house, where appliances were plugged into extension cords that snaked out of the wall like an erupting nest of vipers.

I used Canadian pennies as ammunition for my slingshot when aiming at the squirrels who ate all the sweetcorn in our garden. Or to put on railroad tracks for the passing locomotives to flatten.

In my twenties I moved to North Dakota. I think North Dakota had more Canadian pennies than Canada did. No one seemed to care. So I stopped caring too.

Here in the present, I never did get any Canadian pennies for my renovated cookie jar. Instead, the bank clerk talked me into getting a sheaf of 20 peso bills -- which I wrapped up with rubber binders. I still call ‘em rubber binders, just like my Midwest parents did. So don’t get on my case, you language elitists!