After reading
this node for the first time in
April,
2003, I decided that it would be a fun way to spend a free
afternoon. I found
seven dollars that I had hidden in my room for a
rainy day and went to the bank to get it changed into
pennies.
I decided that to make the whole experience seem more
innocent, I would walk around to my pennies' destinations instead of driving to and from the places I had planned to drop most of them.
So from the bank, I walked around to the grocery store. Inside, I left a few sporadically on the floor, but found my way to the bathroom, my main goal. I locked the door (keep in mind, this is not a
one stall bathroom, but it did have a lock on the main door). In front of the sink, I left a message written in pennies, careful to leave all the pennies
heads-up:
TAKE
ONE
After I was done, I flushed the
toilet, to give some credibility to myself, should anyone be waiting outside the door to get in, washed my hands and then left. No one was outside, which was a
bummer because I wanted to be there to witness someone walk in and see it. I didn't have much time to spend around the store, so I bought a
Coca-Cola and left.
Walking out into the sunlight again, I made my way down the main street in town, dropping pennies as I went. I came to
Blockbuster, and went inside. On the shelves, by all of my
favorite movies, I placed a penny. I then casually walked out, as if I just simply couldn't find anything I wanted to watch.
After this, I went to the park. Now the
park was the spot I really wanted to drop my
money bombs on. Three on the
slide (one on the ladder, one at the top and one at the bottom), one on every
swing. I placed a few inconspiculously on the
merry-go-round.
After I had run around the park to all the playground equiptment, placing pennies on almost everything, I realized I still had
two full rolls (worth
50 cents) plus about
25 more pennies left. I went over to the slide and
buried the rest of my pennies in the sand.
Walking back to the bank across town, where my car was parked, I felt proud. Seriously,
I felt like I had shared a little bit of myself that day.
I wondered about who would find all my pennies. Perhaps someone walked into the grocery store bathroom right after I left and ended up taking all the pennies. Maybe they just didn't touch them, thinking it was some sort of
ploy by the store to catch a
thief or something. Perhaps they
did as the message said and took one. Maybe no one else went to the bathroom that day and thus, the
teenager having to close the store that night found them while cleaning the bathroom.
Someone checking out
Flight of the Navigator,
Pump up the Volume,
Heathers, or
One Hour Photo picked up the penny I had placed by them or one of the other movies. Maybe they left it, hoping the next
child to come in the store would find it.
And at the park, my pennies were probably found by a
big brother pushing his
sister around on the merry-go-round, or an excited little boy ready to go down the slide for the first time. Perhaps the ones by the
see-saw were found by a parent who picked it up and told their child about the "See a penny, pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck" rhyme.
Maybe the pennies I buried are still there, maybe they were washed up by a rain storm. I buried them pretty deep, but maybe a
third-grader had made a
time capsule of his own and wanted to burry it in the same spot my pennies were, therefore discovering a dollar and a quarter in small change.
Maybe in a month or two I will take a friend with me to go see if we can find them. If they're still there, perhaps we can try and create a new
penny dropping day to remember.
Whatever happened to these pennies, whomever found them,
I hope they got as much delight from
finding them as I did leaving them
lying around.