Loose Change

Rain all day and into the night. The grass and other plants will appreciate it. So do I.

Even on a rainy day, when your dentist tells you nothing else needs to be done to your teeth after a session of cleaning, that puts a spring in your step. Doubly so when the dentist says the same thing about your eldest daughter's teeth, or maybe triply so, since that eldest daughter often has holes that need filling.

Anyway, I dodged some uncomfortable and expensive dentistry again -- for now -- though I do grumble about the cost of cleaning and inspection. Insurance merely drops the price from astronomical to pretty high. But then again, on an annual basis such maintenance isn't so expensive, considering the use that my teeth get.

Later in the day, I noticed this in my pocket change:

A buffalo nickel! In my entire life of handling coins, I've never gotten one of these in pocket change. I was born too late. I am old enough to remember finding silver Roosevelt dimes (and one or two Mercury dimes), silver Washington quarters, silver Kennedy halves and lots of wheat pennies, including one or two 1943 steel cents, but no buffalo nickels.

Of course, as a collectible, it's garden-variety stuff -- a 1936 Denver strike, one of some 24.8 million nickels made at that mint that year, meaning it's not a rarity. Also, it's in Very Good condition at best. So maybe it would fetch $1.50, but I'll never find out, since I'm keeping it.

Remarkably (or maybe not so remarkably) there's a web site devoted just to buffalo nickels, and it tells me that fully 119 million buffaloes were minted at Philadelphia in '36, the most by far of any year and mint for the series. Why so many that year? The answer's somewhere deep in the archives of the Bureau of the Mint, probably.

A few weeks ago, I was at a store, and I noticed a yellowish coin next to the register's cash drawer. It wasn't anything made by the US mint, but I couldn't get close enough to see where it was from.

"What's that coin?" I asked.

"I don't know," the kid behind the counter said.

"Can I look at it?"

"Here, you can have it."

And so I do. It's a 20-centavo piece of recent (1999) vintage. These days, one peso trades for about 9.5¢, so I walked away from that store 1.9¢ richer, if in fact you could trade sums so small. I think I'll keep it, too.

According to Wiki, the reverse not only sports the value of the coin, but the leafage also represents, somehow, "Ácatl (13th day of the Aztec calendar)." I wonder how many Mexicans know that. I suspect that it's proportional to the number of Americans who know that Monticello is on the reverse of the Jefferson nickel, or what the Latin on the dollar bill means (besides E Pluribus Unum, which everyone knows. Right?)

Anyway, it made my day to go into a store and pick up an object unexpectedly that includes something Aztec. I suppose the snake and the eagle have Aztec roots, too, but not from the Aztec calendar.