Coin Collecting

I’ve been collecting coins for my grandchildren since I was ten years old. 

In 1976 my grandmother Mildred gave me a couple of coins and over the next few years she’d add to my nascent collection. 

The coins were the special kind minted in celebration of the US Bicentennial. I don’t remember which coins she gave me first, but I soon had quarters, fifty cent pieces, and silver dollars.

Over the years I’ve passively kept collecting: always looking at the quarters to see if they were my treasured bicentennials; buying the few fifty-centers and silver dollars I’d run across. 

Today my collection at face value is probably worth less than $100 and fits tidily in just one coin binder. None of the items is mint. I’ve added coins and bills that seem interesting to me, like the Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea dollars and two dollar bills also from 1976.   

Still, there is nothing particularly remarkable about my collection. Except for the reason I kept collecting all these years. 

From the very beginning, when my grandmother gave me the coins, I knew I’d keep them so I could give them to my grandchildren. At ten, I was planning on grandkids! 

There are very few things that I’ve held on to over the years. Between moving continents and states, being kicked out of my house then divorce, and later merging different households, only the most essential things got saved. 

Like those coins, destined for the great-great-grandchildren of the woman who gave me my first. 

What seems to me to be a seamless story over generations, must, from the outside, look like quite the pedestrian hobby. Through many dark times, however, I’ve thought of those coins as an anchor to my past and a tether to the future. 

And at the worst of times, those coins helped me choose a path that would allow me to be around for any potential grands. 

Interestingly, I never really told my parents or my kids about the coins. I think they know about them, but it was never anything we talked about. The story is not for them. The tale of our family coins from the bicentennial skips generations, like recessive genes. 

And if I ever have grandchildren and am allowed to be a part of their lives, neither of which is a given at this point, they will possibly live to see the next US birthday.

I wonder if they’ll have any ten-year-old grandkids to buy Tricentennial coins for.