The value of pennies

It was one of those quick needs for something you don’t usually keep around that brought me to Martin Luther King Boulevard Sunday morning. If you must know, it was the need of a substance called liquid nails for the fixing of a swinging door that no longer swings because of a hardware malfunction.

I have friends who know more about these things than I do, and they had placed the order.

So there I was at the customer service line because it was shortest, and the blonde-haired woman with the stylish eyeglasses and big smile said it was perfectly fine for me to check out at that register.

I was happy and made the purchase, and she gave me a few quarters and dimes in change.

I thought about how the copper, silver and whatever other metals they use would end up jingling in pocket when I have to go through a metal detector in the courthouse. Or how it might become the change that never makes it out of the pockets, complaining as it gets tossed in the washing machine or dryer, never to be found once the door is opened and the clothes removed.

“I guess one day we should just do away with the change stuff and round it off to the nearest dollar,” I said to the lady with the smile, drawing an immediate reaction.

“Oh no,” she said, later explaining how stray change has made a big difference in her life.

The woman’s name is Toni Vilardo and she grew up in Baton Rouge where her father, Anthony, worked at the Dow chemical plant.

Every day when he came home from work Anthony would place the change from his pockets in piles on a dresser, and if there was no more room there he would find somewhere else.

“It would pile up and pile up, and sometimes my sister and I we would go in there and take some of it,” Toni confessed.

Anthony never did anything special with the change. But as she got older and ended up generating a lot of change by herself, Tony figured out her own system for dealing with it.

A great big Kentwood water bottle, the kind that is almost too heavy for one person to carry when full, does the trick.

She keeps one of those in a closet, near her shoes and every nickel, penny dime and quarter – even the occasional half or silver dollar – that gets into her pockets or purses is deposited there, and the pile of coins grows and grows.

Near the end of the year that Kentwood bottle can’t hold any more coins, and that’s when Toni cashes it in. But this isn’t just for some random reward.

It’s not for a casino jaunt, or some other such triviality.

No.

Toni takes all that change and takes her two nieces at the end of the year to Walt Disney World in Florida and if that isn’t a lesson in the importance of saving and frugality and the true value of pennies I don’t know what is.

But here is where the value of the coins really comes in, when she ends up at the Magic Kingdom with Isabella who is 13 and Helena who is 11, and suddenly Toni gets to see the world through the eyes of these girls and that is something priceless.

“I think they just teach me how to let go and how to enjoy life, because they are kids, they have no problems,” Toni says. “Kids have no filter. They have not started to care what people think.”

And what if the girls get too old for the Disney trips?

“Hmm, they may not want to do it much longer,” Toni says. “But I have other, younger nieces and nephews that I could take.”