The first one shone, newly minted, against the black asphalt, just beyond my back tire at the gas station. I picked it up, not wishing to jinx good luck. I turned it over, and sure enough, it was imprinted with 2014. I’m not sure how early in a new year new coins are released, and it’s only a few more months that the US Mint will produce these costly little disks, so it had to be an omen of good things to come. Sometimes, all that keeps a person going is the promise of good fortune, regardless of how flimsy the source. I pocketed the penny and kept my eye on the gas pump.
The second one, dull and blackened, camouflaged in the asphalt, gave itself away while I was mussing with things in the trunk. I left that one alone, not sure what would happen if I picked it up. I searched for any memory of the cumulative luck of finding two pennies, and came up short. Would the second penny double the good luck of the first? Cancel it? I couldn’t be sure, couldn’t take the chance. Not this week.
The third one was in the corner of the bathroom, easier to contemplate than the urinal, which, in this now appropriated-as-unisex space, will still and always be a men’s room, no matter what the new plaque on the door says. I didn’t pick it up – wouldn’t touch anything on any men’s room floor, sorry guys, but that’s just the way it goes – no matter that I face away from the usual splatter zone, no matter what superstitious forces I flaunted by walking away from the third penny to offer itself up to me today.
In the wide open space where there used to be my father, I conjure mystical possibilities of three pennies; not much to go on, not even a beggar’s handful. How this Threepenny Opera will end, I don’t yet know. In Brecht’s, the antihero, standing on the scaffold, receives a last-minute Queen’s pardon. Even our thieves and cutthroats – perhaps especially these – garner our sympathy, our key to the kingdom and castle. Antiheros know, “One must live well to know what living is.”
Even though I will be fatherless for the rest of my days, I will at the very least live well. I will take my pleasure, steal my moments, sharpen my teeth, search out the elements that gleam and shine in all life’s gas stations and men’s rooms.
Prayer is a somewhat unnatural act that requires a perfect balance of “unknowing” what we know and filling in the gaps this creates. We can fill it with – worship – anything: ritual, superstition, rote memory, song, dance, sensual pleasure, fear of the unknown, curiosity, or blind faith.
I don’t seem to have enough faith to believe in a heavenly Kingdom, or that if Heaven exists my father is there, or that there is some place where he continues to exist, outside of the DNA in my cells, the blood in my veins, pictures on my dining room table, the open space where he surely used to be and is no more.
And yet.
Sometimes, superstition trumps faith. With insufficient faith, I recite an ancient prayer twice each day, offering gratitude for being alive, recommitting myself to that which lives on, asking for abundant peace from the Heaven I doubt is there, declaring the glory of a God whose presence to me is as fleeting as pennies dropped carelessly from another’s pocket.