Quarters
Not funny, not ironic, maybe not much of a deal at all for anyone who’s not me, BUT:
This morning, while buying a card for my soon-to-be one-year-old nephew, I received change on a bill of $3.24 paid with a ten. One of those quarters in that $6.76 in change was the Last One – the one I could only have imagined in April of 1999 at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. while on a trip with my high school’s concert band. My first was one from Pennsylvania, and over the next nine and a half years – 9 1/2 years – I would flip over most any quarter I’d see – starting with the obviously newer shiny ones, but filling in the gaps as I had to – to find if the image on the back of that quarter was one that I didn’t have in my set, a set of 50 with one from each state, not two that would include one from the Philadelphia mint and one from the Denver mint – didn’t start over when I found that tidbit out, and don’t mind…
Yes, I’ve been collecting state quarters since that warm, promising spring day in my senior year of high school, when I was seventeen, when I hadn’t yet gotten drunk, gone to college, gone to Europe for three weeks, worked my first job, loved and lost, wrote my epic, graduated from college, graduated from grad school, spiralled into depression, started work… my entire adult life, literally, the many high points and the several lows, and every split second in-between has been running alongside this pursuit of completism, wholeness for the sake of wholeness, collecting shards of Americana to make a country infinitely more easily than it happened in real life, all the while making of myself and my many possible futures one coherent, layered but ultimately cogent self, e pluribus unum and all the rest…
This morning, in the cold sun striking Amsterdam Avenue between 72nd and 73rd Street, I found my Hawaii quarter.
One chapter of my life closed as a direct result of my desire to commemorate the progress of another life.
I installed it in its slot just a little while ago. Documented it.
And all this in the hours leading up to the longest night of the year, which so too ends with the commemoration of new life, with tomorrow’s Solstice sunrise.
Cheers–
