The penny will certainly live with the dodo in the part of heaven reserved for extinct things if I defend it. I have a knack. I never vote right in the primaries, and Tommy Herr was traded to the Twins the week after I got his Cardinals card. Nonetheless, I can't quietly watch the penny become the business of second hand shops and children bored with monopoly money.
It has in its favor these things: its name, the name of a girl or a lane; its color, the sign of good plumbing; its heft, just right for dead eyes; its love of prime numbers, seventeen cents and forty-one cents and seventy-three; its president, symbol of my native Illinois, a hard working man who would respect me for saving my pennies and rolling them up and spending the quarters I get in exchange in Laundromats and newsstands only; the only president to wear a bow tie on his coin, the only one tall enough to carry off a coin worth so little, worth one more than nothing, worth saving.
[This poem is actually 25 years old or more. Relevant again.]
marniere 