passing the time

do you know what i did today? i sorted pennies. for real. over 2thousand 2hundred and fifty pennies. i sorted them into decades - 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s - and then i rolled them. got $22, 1 penny from every year starting in 1950, and some from before that. my oldest is from 1909. does this sound interesting? i assure you it's not. although, i am fascinated by "old" things - antique, ancient, vintage. i don't know many romantics who wouldn't rather find themselves caught up in some decade past than the modern era in which they live. it's easy to romanticize the past, even though it almost certainly was not much better than the present, and in many cases, probably worse. i suppose one could blame media - books, films - for creating a picture of the past that's more beautiful than true... but even without these depictions, i think there would still be those of us who would imagine history as pure adventure and true romance, while ignoring the mundane details of everyday life that were as real then as they are now. those are the people that write the books and make the films! and to them it doesn't matter that the past was full of pain and hardship and sorrow, because they look through all that and see a beauty that's deeper than pain, and that is what they want to show the world...... and perhaps it doesn't matter that the present is full of the same; there is beauty here, too...

and maybe the beauty of sorting all those pennies isn't in the tedious nature of the task or the fact that your back aches from hunching over for so many hours, but in the moment of childlike joy and excitement when you read the date "1944" or "1913" and gasp with delight at the treasure... the one cent treasure that's somehow worth more than that just because you discovered it, in the old jar of pennies your grandfather left you. maybe it's silly... but that's what i did.