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Pinch those pennies, if just to hear them squeal

I dropped a penny on the pavement the other day. This created a dilemma. Do I bend to pick it up?

Well, yes. You drop something, you pick it up. It is common courtesy and good citizenship.

Except: A penny is not litter, or rather, it is good litter. It is like an apple core. An apple core is far better litter than, say, a bottle cap. An apple core will soon disappear, if not into the belly of a squirrel then into its constituent molecules as nature effects its housecleaning. A penny is similarly biodegradable – it will soon enough be gone.

Except: To not pick up a penny in public is to make a social statement, and an unpleasant one: I am too rich and important to deign to squat for a penny; perhaps you, walking behind me, a person of lower social class, are not so fortunate as I.

Except: If you leave it, the penny will be picked up by someone who needs it more than you. It is environmentally inert and socially beneficial.

Except: To not pick up the penny is to make a revealing choice, like deciding to hire a maid service because housework is more onerous to you than expending money. If the penny remains on the sidewalk, you are confessing to a certain degree of lassitude. To some, the physical cost of stooping is worth less than a penny. To others, it is worth a great deal more.

Except: Because the penny is almost without value, picking it up is pointless, and becomes an obnoxious act of public aerobics. You are like one of those joggers who hop in place at street corners while waiting for the light to change, as though they were so leonine that if they were not otherwise physically engaged, they might eat you.

Except: A penny saved is a penny earned.

Except: It isn't. A penny saved is a penny that worries its way through one's pocket, until it makes a hole in the pocket and after a while the pocket has been resewn so many times it is the size of a vest pocket and can accommodate only pennies and lint. You hate the penny. You carried it only because of an act of corporate battery; because the cashier at the supermarket pressed the receipt in your hand and placed the penny on top of it as a paperweight, an aggressive act to forestall littering, forcing you to pocket the receipt, along with the penny, next to a hundred other receipts and loose change jammed into your pocket in a gigantic lumpy wad, making you look like a smuggler of luffa sponges or dachshunds, but for some reason you keep these receipts, as though you might someday need to prove to the IRS that you purchased, on this day, at this time, two lemons.

Except: It is ridiculous to hold the penny responsible.

Except: It is responsible. It is a commercial absurdity, manufactured at a cost greater than its value. You hate the penny because it cannot be used to buy anything but itself. You hate the penny because Lincoln was a slave owner.

Except: That was Washington.

Except: You are beyond reason now. You hate the penny for the same reason you hate stores that make you tell them your first name before you can pick up your chicken and fries, for the same reasons you hate directory assistance for asking if you want them to dial the number for you at a cost of 30 cents, which is 30 cents for two seconds' work, which comes out to about $500 an hour, but you submit to the extortion because you don't have a pencil handy and your short-term memory isn't what it used to be for the same reason it hurts to bend for a penny.

Except: What if it turns out to be a copper-jacketed 1943 Lincoln cent, the war-issue rarity worth a quarter of a million dollars, and your dropping it was God's way of testing your citizenship and rewarding you if you made the right decision and punishing you if you made the wrong one?

Except: If you don't pick it up, you will never know of your bad fortune, and God's lesson would be lost, and God does not work that way.

Except: Who are you to presume to know how God works?

You pick up the penny. It is a 1981, worth one cent. So you put it back in your pocket, where it instantly finds the hole it probably fell through in the first place, insolently tickles your thigh and calf, and bounces back onto the pavement.

That's how God works.

This time, you let it lie.

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