For coins with so small a value, pennies feature in an outsized number of idioms. The hardworking penny gets pressed into action for a wide variety of linguistic uses, whether describing sudden realisations, the constant reappearance of unwanted people or situations, or just old-fashioned frugality. The dollar may be the world’s reserve currency, but the English language runs on pennies.
Even in the United States, where the Britishness in our shared language has been stripped from both terminology and spelling, cents remain pennies.
My brother, Christopher, always carried a large, old penny. He had a box of them, from which he gifted to people in his inner circle, inducting them into what he called The Penny Club. The ethos of this was, “If you have a penny in your pocket, you’ll never be poor.”
With Apple Pay and Uber, I seldom need more than my phone when going out. My wallet mostly sits on my desk at home, so my penny doesn’t get out as much as it used to. But it’s left such an obvious penny outline on the wallet’s leather that I’m aware of its presence even without holding it.
Christopher loved an adventure. As students, we did a couple of memorable road trips to Durban, driving through the Karoo with overnight stops. It was his idea that we enter the first season of Ultimate Braaimaster in 2012, and the following year we did a supercar rally (read about that here). In true Christopher Adventure style, he chartered a private flight to get us from Cape Town to Johannesburg to start the rally, with us having had a road trip a few months prior to get his car to the start.
We also did a few trips to Botswana, where he had a share in a lodge in the Tuli Block.
Even as men in our forties, our adventures had the joyful innocence of the made-up games we played as little boys growing up on a farm.
Years before I had any intention of taking on the Cape Epic, he called me one night with the suggestion that we tackle this as our next adventure. It wasn’t on my bucket list then, but I immediately said yes, hoping that the lifestyle changes required of him would turn his life around. It so happened that his next holiday was to Vietnam, where the chafing caused by doing a little city touristing on bikes made him change his mind.
He died in 2015, a few months after turning 49. Maybe because of the avoidable nature of his death, I have felt a certain amount of heaviness around his loss, but in the past days the penny has brought back lightness, through my memories of his sense of adventure and the fun we had together. In a way, the penny is his proxy.
I am watching his son grow up, feeling the pride that he would have. I carry the penny with me on adventures, making new memories, reminded at every step that the value of experiences far outweighs the cost of paying for them. This is richness worth having.
It is one of the idiosyncrasies of money that the cost of manufacturing coins exceeds their face value. In the case of the noble penny this seems entirely appropriate.