Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Flatten your hand and squeeze your fingers together. Look at the base of your index and middle fingers. Most people have a coin-slot-sized space there. Alas, we are anatomically engineered to allow money to slip through our fingers. That’s my excuse. And that is likely why, according to my findings, dimes far outnumber any other lost coin. They drop by design.
A few years ago while on sabbatical, I resolved, Thoreau-like, to keep a record of everything I found in my wanderings over the course of a year. For I am a finder – although not always a keeper – and a walker. Like a crow, I have an eye for spotting shiny things – coins, a lone silver hoop earring, buttons, buckles, safety pins, paper clips – useful items some, which end up in my pocket and are eventually deposited in a heaped wooden dish on my dresser.
I know, there may be intimations of a pathology here, but I like to think of my findings more as a kind of game. And, during my sabbatical year at least, as research.
Number of quarters found: one
Number of nickels found: six
Number of dimes found: 23
Dimes frequently slip through our fingers and fall into the snow piled at the base of a parking-ticket machine, under the counter at a cashier, onto the sidewalk where they bounce and roll like dizzy unicycles into a tuft of lawn or over the curb’s brink.
Thinness surely accounts for the ease with which dimes slide out of our purses, pockets and fingers. Dimes minted since 1979 are 1.22 millimetres thin, 20 per cent slimmer than the bygone penny. The dime also has so little mass – since the advent of nickel-plating in 2000, only 1.75 grams compared with 3.95 for the nickel and 4.4 for the quarter – that it is hard to grip and lift out of a coin purse or slide into a slot.
My most curious findings are metal washers – of all sizes. At the curbside, and even on sidewalks, there they are, these flat, fat, nickel-plated Os. They remind me that there are still mysteries afoot. In my year of picking shamelessly, I stooped to lift only four washers off the streets and sidewalks of Kingston, my hometown. I had collected so many over the years that I didn’t need to add to my hoard. But my list of findings records that I spied a goodly number.
Where do they come from, these washers by the wayside? Washers, it appears, fall like perforated pennies from heaven. If they had fallen off something after a bolt or screw had loosened, there should be a comparable number of bolts and screws to be found, which is not the case, according to my findings. Most likely, washers bounce off the backs of contractors’ trucks, slide under tailgates or slip through the fingers of appliance technicians making house calls.
The streets are awash with lost washers, big and small, if you have an eye for them. I found one this morning, the size of a quarter, on a downtown sidewalk as I stopped to buy a coffee. It’s on the desk beside me as I write, mysterious and inviting speculation. Ah, I’ve got it now: Washers are the dimes of the hardware world. I’ve kept the Fibber McGee drawer at home well stocked with elastic bands of all sizes that I frequently find in my wanderings. The wide blue elastic that is snapped around bundles of mail is ubiquitous in neighbourhoods that still have house-to-house delivery.
Once, while walking end to end on Mowat Avenue, which runs north-south for 14 blocks, I followed a trail of blue rubber bands dropped by a heedless postie. Every 30 to 50 metres I would find one discarded along the sidewalk, and even one looped on a branch of a bush, where I imagined it had landed after springing from the postie’s hands.
Like Psyche gathering flecks of fleece from the golden rams, I collected the elastics as I ambled. By the time I reached the north end of the avenue, my left forearm was banded with more than a dozen. According to the manufacturer, those blue postal elastics are made from natural rubber and “have extra strength and stretch for most critical bundling requirements.” A good rubber band is not hard to find.
I’ve made a similar game supplying myself with paper clips. I’ve never purchased a box. Paper clips, I imagine, breed like rattlesnakes in the halls of academe. Dart your eyes to the sides of the terrazzo hallways that lead to classrooms or along the corridors where professors are hived, and paper clips will appear. They spring off documents around photocopiers, library tables and counters, and rest under chairs in the corners of student and faculty lounges. They slip from essays scooted under office doors by bleary-eyed students.
My pocket change purse usually contains a paper clip or two that I have plucked. Occasionally, with professorial grace, I will offer one pre-emptively to a student about to bend (and afterward sometimes bite!) the top left corner of the loose pages of an essay before submitting it.
“The universe will provide you with a paper clip when you need it,” I say, smiling as I hand one over. And a lot of other useful things as well, according to my findings.
Irwin Streight lives in Kingston.