Negril Notes

Penny thoughts …

September 8, 2006

Last Sunday morning I found myself alone at a railroad siding waiting to hop the train into Philly. I was a good ten minutes early, so I sat near the tracks, leaned back and closed my eyes.

When I was a kid Peter O’Malley and I would make day long explorations to the frontier of our world. We would ride our bikes back behind the Tingley Rubber factory, the hilarity of the name lost on our twelve year old experience, for us this was the height of reckless adventure, though actually, we were only a few miles from home.

Cutting a swath a few hundred feet wide through the woods were high tension wires that seemed to go on forever, maybe even as far as Route 1, I don’t think we ever went far enough to find out, we usually stopped near some train tracks.

We’d sit at the road-less crossroads looking up and down the tracks and we’d argue as to where the tracks led. Peter, always a bit more grounded in reality than I, would say, “Up there (North) is Iselin and down there (South) is Trenton.” Me, on the other hand, would conjure up names like Tuxedo, New York or Bel-Aire, Maryland, claiming I knew better since my Grandfather worked these rails “before the War.” I probably didn’t know what “before the War” really meant, and maybe not even sure what war I was even referring to.

It might have been my enduring fascination with maps. As a kid I’d lay out a map on the living room floor and look for distant magical destinations, like Nashua, New Hampshire, or Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (I only had a Northeast US map). Then I’d figure a route, calculate mileage, and read about the places of interest on the back of the map, or I’d look them up in the Funk & Wagnalls kept in the hallway bookcase.

Sometimes we’d put pennies on the track, urban legend had it that the train would stretch and flatten them into oval copper discs. Try as we might, the train never showed up, or if it did, it was so long we lacked the patience to wait for the caboose, so we never found out if the stories were true.

Shaken back to the present by a distant ambulance siren, I reached into my pocket to search for pennies; I had six.

Looking all around like an unpracticed criminal, I carefully placed the six pennies end to end in the center of the rail, making sure to alternate between heads and tails. Moments later the train came into view, and for some reason I stepped away from the pennies as if to disassociate myself with them.

Late that afternoon I made my way back from Philly, and I’d forgotten all about the pennies until the conductor shouted, “Crestmont Next Stop!”

I stepped from the train and nonchalantly walked away from the platform, just in case the railroad police put out an All Points Bulletin: Be on the lookout for a stealthy criminal penny layer, chances likely perpetrator will return to the crime scene.

I waited till the train was out of sight, and when the coast was clear I turned around to search for my pennies in the rail bed. They weren’t where I left them, but about eight to ten feet away I saw something shiny, and one by one I found all six flattened copper oval discs, almost featureless with faint penny markings.

I felt like a little kid again, and all the way home I turned the coins every which way with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment.

All this week I’ve carried the former coins in my pocket and I discovered I wasn’t the only one who thought they were cool. Every guy I showed them to was impressed; it was a universal male reaction. Older guys, younger guys, black guys, white guys, Spanish guys, skinny guys, fat guys, even Phil, a drunk guy; everyone got it! They would ask to hold one and look at it in wonder as I told my story. 

I also showed them to several women, they didn’t get it. They just looked at me with a blank expressions and asked, “Why the hell would you do that?”

I guess women are just more complicated. 

Peace

Vinny

 

Filed under: Family, Philly, Writing