SOLTuesday: My Life in 50 Objects, part 4

I’m trying to document the objects I have that my relatives may wonder about after I die and am no longer around for them to ask. (I’m not planning to die anytime soon, but it’s better to do this before I need to. My mother said she’d do it for her jewelry, and she never did.) So here are some small objects, mostly sitting on my bureau.

            The penny jar is a holdover from my college days. At Antioch College, we were given several booklets of “food stamps” to use in the cafeteria, campus coffee shop, and the Inn, the campus restaurant for visitors. The stamps were in denominations comparable to coins, but there were no penny stamps. So students would accumulate pennies over the course of a quarter (no semesters at this school), and since many of us had empty Chianti bottles, those became our default “penny jars.”

            Once I left school, saving pennies had become a habit. This jar holds around $12 worth when it’s full, and as you can see, I recently redeemed its contents. Since the pandemic lockdown, I haven’t used cash for anything, and who knows when I will again. Maybe there won’t be anymore pennies for this jar.

           

This sadly tarnished silver dumbbell was a baby gift for our daughter from the parents of a very old friend. They lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and we met them only a couple of times, but we really appreciated the gift, a teething object that Christie used quite a bit as a baby. I’m bad at the kind of maintenance this would require. Maybe putting a photo of this in public will force me to clean it up.

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