I made sure to stick my lucky pennies into my backpack before walking to my only final exam last term. After all, I hadn't had time to study, due to a traumatic car accident only fourteen hours before, and my grade was already far below par. Yes, I needed the pennies. I needed luck. I needed a miracle.
Fortunately, I'd been carrying around good ol' 1985D since my freshman year of high school, when a friend gave it to me on a Friday the thirteenth. Needless to say, I had a great day that day, and the rest was history.
1985D and I have gone through a lot together. It (I'm not sure if it's a he or a she) once got lost on a Fourth of July, but with the help of the next addition to the penny family, 1980, I found it. Quite a magical event, I must say. And since those early days, the family has grown to include four pennies, though those first two will always remain closest to my heart.
Anyway, I had them with me when I walked into that big, creepy Rocky room for the final. They were seated snugly in my knapsack as I wrote my name on the bluebook, they waited patiently as I tried painfully to come up with correct identifications for words I didn't know, and they silently screamed as I shut the half-empty book only 20 minutes into the exam.
Suddenly busting with strange, confident independence, I took the book to the front of the room, and bizarrely boasted to the professor, "I didn't know any of the answers." I swaggered out like an idiot, and began the long walk home in the cold.
I thought for sure my failure would hit me, freezing my insides much like the unnaturally cold end-of-March air was freezing my outsides. But it didn't. I just didn't care at all. While I walked home from that disastrous final, a strange feeling overcame me-- whether or not the pennies were aware of it, I'm not sure.
For the first time since January 13, 1995, I was questioning the goodness, the reality of my precious lucky coins. I mean, was my belief in the great copper discs just another kind of blind faith? Was I letting some stupid superstition guide me? I was an idiot, a pawn, a dupe.
I'd had the flat cylindrical symbols of faith with me in the car as it spun in the snow and smashed into the freeway's guardrail the night before. Suddenly, I wasn't sure if the pennies were responsible for saving my life, or if they had possibly even caused the accident. Or perhaps it was an utterly magic-less night altogether, and I'd been crashed and saved by ice and airbags, respectively.
The four monetarily worthless coins had flown with me and a friend from Edinburgh to Frankfurt this fall, a flight remembered by us all as the one in which the flaps broke mid-flight, sending us temporarily back to Scotland and sending my friend into a rather frightening state of teary, arm-flailing hyperventilation.
At the time, of course, I thanked my pocket deities for sparing our lives and for helping the flapless plane land safely. However, we did almost die, we did have to spend 23 painful hours in Frankfurt Airport, and we did get rerouted to a completely different final destination city due to the delay. Lucky or tragic? I have no idea.
Absorbed in thought, I made it home safely after that final, armed with a new sense of freedom and responsibility. I was alone and important, and I was loving every minute of it. Happily, my disappointment in the pennies had quickly transferred into a rather silly carpe diem type way of thinking. I didn't need my pennies.
Still, as I boarded my plane to go home from school for break, I had my lucky pieces of legal tender held hotly in my hand. When faced with bad weather and confusing, complex machinery that flies thirty thousand feet above the earth, I still needed something to trust. Some part of me still needed to believe in the pennies.
I thought that maybe coming back to school and receiving my penny-influenced grade in that chaotic class would be a deciding factor. The fate of the pennies and the truth of their magic rested in the outcome of the class. And I was perfectly prepared for the worst, for an F or a D; I was ready to boast to my friends that I'd gotten the first letter warning me of my newly flawed academic standing.
And then I got a C+. Somehow the pennies had come through; a miracle had occurred. On paper at least, no clear sign of struggle or disaster or failure was apparent. I'd done better than satisfactory (according to the old-time scale, that is, when a C was average).
Yet, I was still a little disappointed. I'd lost the chance to tell the good academic failure story. The climax of my tale of the term from hell was gone, flattened out into a boring C+.
And thus, through all of this spiritual and philosophical questioning, I've returned to my safety-belief: either things will work out okay or you'll have a good story to tell. At least if you're carrying four very lucky and loyal pennies.
