numismatists

My grandchildren were here the other evening and got out the bag of pennies to “feed” our little bank, a wooden lady whose head swivels to drop the coin from her mouth into her body. It is a fun game for them. When they left, we unscrewed the lady’s head to put the pennies back into the bag for their next visit and Eli (here to watch a movie with us) commented that he’d never seen a 2000 penny. Hannah claimed she’d seen several and thus began an evening of discovery into the magical world of numismatics. The movie was forgotten as Eli, Hannah and Isaac spread out all the pennies, sorting them according to year, lining up each year into a column so as to study their dispersion ratios. They had more fun than you can imagine, more than they ever imagined. When all the pennies were laid out on the living room carpet in an orderly array, but they weren’t yet satisfied with their game, I retrieved a handful of pennies from my purse and Hannah found 79 more in her coin dish (she counted them so she could get them back). They discovered there were far more from the year 2007 than any other year. The earliest was from the 40’s (not counting the 1918 penny I have stashed away for safe keeping). A couple of years weren’t represented at all, but Eli was quite happy there were several pennies from 2000. They discussed the statistical implications of their findings; they took pictures of their work, and Eli declared he might just give up his masters work in psychology to sort and order coins full time… we think that was spoken in jest.