The Penny Jar

At almost every wedding you could count on my father telling the newly wed couple: “You know, if you put a penny in a jar every time you make love during the first year of marriage and then removed a penny from the jar every time you make love thereafter …you will never empty the jar.” One of my cousins didn’t quite understand the jest of the challenge and, for years, every time she saw my father she would say, “Uncle John, we’re still putting pennies in our jar.” He tried to explain it to her a couple times before just giving up and responding, “That’s great, Becky.” When my father passed away earlier this year, while helping my mother pack up some of his things from their room, I found an old glass jar with a few pennies in it under the night table on his side of the bed. I chuckled, and, after showing it to his wife of fifty-nine years, my mother, I said, “Looks like you guys were just a few pennies short of emptying your jar.” My mother shook her head and responded, “That old fool just kept putting his change in that jar and telling me; ‘We still got some work to do to empty this thing.’” I dumped the few pennies into my hand and noticed two of them with wheat stems on the back, indicating they were old pennies. I handed them to my mom and told her to look at the date on them. 1952 – the year they were married. A tear came to her eyes again, as had happened often over the past few weeks, and she just said again, “That old fool.” I dumped the pennies back into the jar and placed it over on her side of the bed. We continued packing up his stuff in silence.