Nishad Palamullathil, LD2 A Penny for Your Thoughts Shannon Glasgow, ACB ALB

A Penny For Your Thoughts

Shannon Glasgow, ACB ALB

One day this past summer when I was back home in the US. I took off my tennis shoes and threw them on the floor next to my black work shoes. As they hit the carpet, there was a slight clinking sound. Of course, I knew why there was a sound like this coming from my shoes, but I didn’t know why there should be a clinking sound in the first place.

Do you have any habits or rituals that you routinely do without questioning them? For me, whenever I find a coin, I put it in my shoe. I don’t ask questions. I just do it. Slip it right in the top of my shoe and then wiggle my foot a bit so that the coin reaches a comfortable position. Usually it’s a copper penny, but this summer I also found a quarter, which is worth slightly less than one UAE dirham. I was wearing my black work shoes when I found that treasure, so that’s where it is until now.

So why the clinking sound? You see, those coins usually stay in my shoes a while. Maybe weeks. Perhaps months. And since I often look down when I walk in parking lots, where most of these beauties have been left for people like me to find, my eyes tend to focus like a hawk. That means one penny is often joined by another. This summer, I found more than 12 pennies, so you can imagine the clinking sound when the shoe hit the floor and turned over. If we were having face to face meetings now and a fellow Toastmaster said he / she didn’t believe I put coins in my shoe, I would proudly show them (provided I was sure I didn’t have any holes in my socks) the evidence. Now, each of my tennis shoes is down to one penny each, while only my right work shoe has a quarter. Where did the coins go? No, I wasn’t at a check out counter at a store, discovering that I was short of change in my pocket. “Excuse me, ma’am. I think I’ve got a few extra cents in my left shoe.” I don’t think that would go over very well.

I usually reach a point where I tell some of the coins; “Right, you’ve been in there long enough. Out you come back to civilization”, and I put the coin with the other spendable pieces of metal. But not all of them. Some lucky ones usually get to travel kilometers and kilometers in the sole of my shoes for days or months.

“Just because a behavior isn’t logical doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue doing it”

This particular day, as I took my shoes off, I became curious as to why I displayed this kind of peculiar behavior, so I decided to visit Mother Google. To my amazement, I discovered that there was actually some sayings about picking up pennies and putting them in shoes:

See a penny, pick it up, all day long you will have good luck.  Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you will have good luck. Find a penny leave it there, all the day you will have despair.  Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you will have good luck. Put the penny in your shoe, and good luck will come to you.  Find a penny, pick it up, all day long, you will have good luck. Give it to a faithful friend; then your luck will never end.  Find a penny, pick it up, all day long, you will have good luck. Find a penny, let it lie, you will need a penny before you die. Not only that, but I also discovered with the help of Mother Google that fate could be affected by whether a person finds the penny heads up or tails up. Now I realize that I shouldn’t have put all those pennies in my shoes all those years. If I had focused only on the heads up ones, I could have had better luck. I also learned that some believe that money contains invisible energy passed between the previous owner and the next person who finds the coin. That means that all these years, powers I wasn’t even aware of were actually being transferred to me. Little did I know.

Had I ever heard of these sayings or superstitions before, perhaps when I was young? Who knows? Am I going to stop putting coins in my shoes? No way! Just because a behavior isn’t logical doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue doing it. Don’t want to tempt fate, after all.