Melting Snow

Monday Memories of Lucky Pennies and Penny Candy

Monday, May 23, 2016

If Wishes Were Horses  (E) Horses and fishes poets and beggars #2085125 by Prosperous Snow celebrating

The "Blogging Circle of Friends "  prompt for Day 1286
Write a story or poem using this quote as inspiration;
Find a penny, pick it up,
And all the day you'll have good luck.
Old Saying

A lucky penny
is a penny from heaven
a gift from someone you loved.

A penny is a copper coin intended to be spent on candy. Yes, I remember penny candy. There was a little store on College Street or Avenue in Blackwell, Oklahoma. Grandpa, Grandma, Mama or Daddy (when he was still living with us) would give use pennies. Some of the pennies I would put in my iron doggy bank (the bank was a gift to Mama from her parents). Some of the pennies I would take with me to the little store to purchase penny candy. If I had enough of the pennies, I could purchase a pack of candy cigarettes and pretend I was grown up enough to smoke cigarettes. No wonder I became a smoker in my adult years, the cigarette companies indoctrinated me as an impressionable child.

A lucky penny
lies face up on the sidewalk
waits to be picked up.

According to the old superstition about lucky pennies, if the penny is laying head up then it's all right to pick it up because it will be lucky. A penny on the ground with its tail facing up is unlucky. I don't know where all the superstition came from, but I'm sure that the way the penny is laying on the ground has nothing to do with luck. When a penny is dropped there is a fifty fifty chance it will land either face up or tail up because it only has two sides. I picked up a lot of pennies in my life, about half the time the pennies are heads up and the other half heads down. I have not had any more bad luck when I picked up heads up pennies then when I picked up heads down pennies. I'm not sure I believe in luck any more then I believe in coincidence.