I’ve had this inaugural post written for several weeks, and never got around to finishing it. It seems appropriate that today, Father’s Day, would be the time to release it. Typically, this blog will be an assortment of pieces like this, and other semi-techy stuff that I need to get out of my head.
My grandfather passed away on New Year’s Eve, 2005 2004. It always seemed like 2005 to me. He was a complex and often conflicted man, who was at times frustrating and inexcusably harsh, yet he was among the most good-hearted people I’ve known. This Jekyll/Hyde situation left one guessing as to which grandpa would show up on a given day, but either way, I rooted for the sweet family man with the silly sense of humor, and tried to dismiss the cranky curmudgeon if possible.
Joe Downey on a tiny bike on a Navy ship.
In his later years, he became increasingly immobile and dealt with chronic pain. He was a great outdoorsman, a navy mechanic, and craftsman in his youth, but years of hard work and the resultant physical damage caught up with him. Still, he managed to keep up with several hobbies even as his body failed.
When I was a kid, my grandpa turned me on to coin collecting. It is definitely a “young boy and his grandpa” sort of activity and I will always identify it as such. In my adult life, I have little time to devote to squinting over dimes and looking for mint marks, but I still appreciate the storytelling and historical aspects of the practice. When I see an old coin, I like to imagine who held it in their hand before me, and what was happening the day that chunk of metal was violently smashed into something of perceived value to humanity.
Maybe because he was bored and stuck in the house, or maybe because he simply liked it a lot, my grandpa stuck with coin collecting until his last day at home. He had established a fairly substantial eBay habit to fill gaps in his collections, but his main late period interest was the state quarter releases. He organized the quarters per state and its respective entrance into the union. Most curiously (and resourcefully), he chose to store the quarters in prescription pill bottles, each carefully labeled with the state’s name and mint. For the finishing touch, he engineered custom wooden shelving to hold each one of these pill bottles, with little circular holes for each one.
I’m predisposed to finding meaning in things, so I think this assortment is fascinating. For starters, it’s telling that he had so many pill bottles at his disposal, though I don’t think these were all from his own prescriptions (maybe he made friends with a pharmacist.) He lovingly and obsessively sorted these coins, but for what purpose other than his own amusement is not clear — he may have intended to share the collection with some of my younger cousins.
Most bittersweet is that the quantity of coins per state decreases markedly over time. The early pill bottles are often overflowing, but later states are represented by only one or two coins; the collection whimpers to an end abruptly at state 35 (West Virginia), which was the last quarter released before his death. He had the full intention of completing this collection, as I also have 15 states’ worth of empty, pre-labeled pill bottles that never met their destined purpose of coin containment.
These bottles have been sitting in a box in my basement since mid-2005. Mainly, I’ve been too busy to do anything with them, but I’ve also been in a quandary about what to do. I was initially planning to complete the collection, but I decided against interfering with such a vivid snapshot in time. My wife suggested that we just cash in the quarters, which is pragmatic and sensible. Individually, they have high circulation rates, and are not in a physical condition to be worth much above their face value, even many decades from now. My grandpa had a more valuable collection of older coins — which we are also storing — and our storage space is at a premium!
But cashing it in would neglect the object quality of the overall collection. All together, this is his last work. I envision him assembling the bottles, labeling them, analyzing each quarter and placing it in its right spot. I suspect that like any good journey, the process of collection was more entertaining than the end result. Yet the end result (and my imagining of the process) is all I’ve got.
In my perhaps fatalist view, we spend our modern lives reenacting a watered down prehistoric hunter-gatherer role, assembling odds and sods, only to leave them behind when we die. These materials will outlast us, whether in a landfill or in our grandson’s basement. The question I can’t answer is: do we honor our relatives by keeping up the material things that meant something to them? Or do we simply acknowledge their contextual worth and move along? In a life busy maintaining our own odds and our own sods — of which there are more than ever — what place do these historical objects have? If their value consists primarily of nostalgia or memory, then perhaps the trash heap (or in this case, the bank) is where they belong. I just can’t help but wonder if discarding the objects will inadvertently put the memories in the trash too.
For now at least, I still have the bottles. In a box. In my basement.
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