Author Information
My Father's Coin Collection
My Father’s Coin Collection
During my childhood, my father would occasionally open a small glossy red wooden box, its interior meticulously crowded with a series of hermetically sealed plastic containers, to show me its contents. Each of these perfectly round cylindrical canisters confined a metallic disk whose luster paralleled that of the box which enclosed it and its motley companions. I would observe in admiration as he evacuated the luminous pucks from their efficiently-packed wooden residence one at a time. To me, these coins embodied history and culture; they were relics of an unfamiliar time and fragments of foreign cultures that I could hold in the palm of my hand. The images engraved upon the polished metal roused my interest. To satisfy my curiosity, I would emit a string of questions which, in retrospect, must have provoked an amount of annoyance. Patiently, my father addressed question after question which I had asked on numerous occasions in the not-so-distant past; he affirmed that the panda indeed represents China, the one sporting the three-pronged leaf was undoubtedly forged in a Canadian mint, and that they would become tarnished if the thick plastic skin around them was to be removed. My father would rarely extract the wooden box from its seemingly perennial residence at the topmost shelf of the closet, inaccessible to my undexterous, inexperienced hands. The infrequent opportunities for me to appreciate the coins’ craftmanship and history granted them a venerated status in my impressionable mind. My father’s collection fostered the creation of my own collection. He assisted me in arranging coins which I had plucked out of circulation into a chronological order based on the production date inscribed on their surface. Eventually, I had compiled a collection consisting of common currency, arranged according to their production dates and variants, in a coin folder dotted with disk-shaped indentations. As a child, I evidently lacked appreciation for qualities such as patience, but my father’s collection was a testament to his patience. He had bided his time to obtain each coin at a reasonable price, developing the collection over the course of years. The purchase of each piece in his collection had been preceded by considerable research (and some haggling with the seller). My father never squandered money on superfluous goods, and he considered his collection to be an asset. He kept a detailed catalogue of each of his collection’s components which was updated with each new addition. Unbeknownst to me, my father was molding me into a more mature individual by exemplifying patience, rationality, caution, and efficiency.
