A nickel for my thoughts

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/05/2024 (512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a coin on the edge of the gutter, at that regular seam between asphalt and concrete, shining up silver-bright in the early morning light.

I was on my way to work, on foot. I think there was soft rain.

I found it on April 9, a Tuesday, at around 7 a.m., on Aberdeen Avenue, north side, about five car-lengths west of McPhillips. I don’t know why the date, time and location have any significance — it’s almost as though if I don’t make the effort to keep track of small things, no one ever will.

It was nothing particularly valuable, a little battered by being run over, covered with grit, but I’m a strong believer that no one can afford to turn their back on good luck, no matter how small that luck might be — just in case, later, luck might decide to turn its back on you.

The coin was a nickel — not just any nickel, but a coin bearing the scars and scratches of 59 years of travel.

There were, apparently, 84,876,018 nickels minted in 1965 — but somehow, just one of those millions of coins both survived across almost six decades and made its way to Aberdeen Avenue. To me.

Its effect was one I’m familiar with — if I find something out of place, especially if it’s also out of time (if there is such a thing), I can’t help but try to imagine how it made its way to where it’s ended up. I can imagine the two-dollar, 40-nickel paper roll it came out of when it was brand new, but after that, even my imagination loses grip.

Was it held for ages, almost from brand-new, by someone numismatically inclined, before spilling accidentally into the street, as recently as, say, this January? Or did it travel from shop to shop to bank to pocket to piggy bank for all this time as ever-working change, given and taken in thousands of transactions? It’s been somewhere for all that time — and that idea intrigues me.

And then it wound up free. Has no one else stopped to look at its impressive age? I suppose each one of the other 84,876,017 1965 Canadian nickels has a story, too, every single one of them different.

Last winter, I found a heavily rusted grapnel hook in a thick spruce tree behind a root cellar in Adam’s Cove, N.L. — the imagination runs wild, but no matter how many times I turned the heavy hook in my hands, conjuring pirates, no matter how much rust transferred to my palms, I couldn’t winkle even one scrap of honest information from it about how and when it had made its way to where it was.

It’s funny the way we don’t rub off on objects, even though we can rub parts of them away: I have two near-identical wood-handled filleting knives, made by the same manufacturer, a newer one that has always belonged to me, and an older one that was my mother’s. (Those two knives, by the way, made most of the cuts on the cutting board in the background of the photograph of the nickel accompanying this column.)

It’s easy to tell the two knives apart: my mother always liked a well-sharpened knife, and the blade of her knife is clearly thinner — top to bottom — than mine, tiny fragments of her blade long ago whetted away on a whetstone, grains of metal dust scattered, I’m sure, over kitchens in homes in provinces on both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and dusted through the occasional American state as well. (I sharpen knives infrequently, primarily when they’re so dull that using them actually annoys me.)

But that knowledge virtually only exists with me, not with the knives at all. While a knife’s form is intrinsic to its function, there’s no intrinsic information about just how that form came to be.

Oh, and back at last to found nickels.

My new-to-me Aberdeen Avenue 1965 is not the only coin — not even the only nickel — I’ve kept, not by far.

I remember another Canadian nickel I found in, perhaps, 2019, on a curve on Mount Scio Road in St. John’s, N.L., a nickel where no nickel should be, a road where no one ever seemed to walk but me.

It was a nickel buried edge up in the roadside gravel, a 1962 nickel with the painfully young image of Queen Elizabeth, boasting the flat edges that some older nickels do, a coin lost or abandoned in front of a tumbling-down, plywood-windowed expropriated house that was sitting on what’s now parkland, waiting to be torn down. That house may be gone now — except not in my memory.

It’s lot of information for a nickel to hold, all of it just from the short period of my possession.

All of it wrapped up in 4.54 grams of nickel metal that, melted down, would be worth exactly 12 cents, as of May 15, 2024.

Another precious in the peculiar collection.

Eventually, the house will be completely chock-full of treasures, many of them with only one key — one frail human key — to the codex of what they mean and where they came from. Where they fit.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca