MANDY FLYNN: A penny for your thoughts

I was walking to my car when something small and dark caught my eye. A dull something, but still enough to glimmer and catch my attention. And as I got closer I saw what it was, lying on the pavement a few feet from my driver’s side door. A penny.

One lone penny.

I readjusted my bag on my shoulder and squatted down to pick it up.

“A penny. Somebody’s thinking about you,” a woman’s voice said and I straightened up and turned around to see her walking past. I smiled. Thinking about me? I’d never heard that one.

Find a penny pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck. I’ve heard that one. But thinking about me?

She stopped at her car across from mine and, as she searched for her keys, she explained.

“Angels. When an angel misses you they toss a penny in your path. Someone’s thinking of you.”

“Have a good night,” she said as she got into her car and I returned the pleasantry as I got into mine, the cool penny clenched in my fingers. I opened them slowly and looked at the coin against my palm. It was scratched in places and Lincoln’s profile was worn from age. I had to squint to see the year, tilt it just right so the light would hit it. At first I thought it was 1988. And then 1986. But no. It was 1968.

The year I was born.

The hairs on my arms stood up for a split second. If what she said was true, if finding a penny in my path meant someone was thinking of me, that an angel sent me a sign, then this was surely one. The penny was made the year I was born.

And I found it on my birthday.

That very day. It was my birthday. Was my father or my grandparents … now angels in heaven … was one of them thinking of me on my birthday? I didn’t know, but I liked the idea. And I decided then and there I would never think of pennies on the ground the same again. Not ever.

I sat there in the moment. And I smiled. Because at that very moment my heart felt fuller. All because of one lone penny.

I worked with a woman once who said she knew when her mother was thinking of her because a little brown bird would come to the bird feeder she had outside her kitchen window.

There were other brown birds that fed there, she said, but this one was different. It was smaller than the rest and was the only one that had a patch of bright yellow on its wing. Yellow was her mother’s favorite color, she told us. And the first time the little brown bird with the yellow on its wing came to her bird feeder, she was sitting at her kitchen table crying and thinking about her mother. Missing her.

And then … there it was. The little bird. She had never seen it there before. The moment she did, however, she felt better. Calmer.

It was a sign. Her sign that her mother was with her, she told us. And I believed her.

They say there are signs all around us of people we love who are no longer here, signs that they are thinking of us, that they are missing us and protecting us. All we have to do is pay attention. When we’re sad and when we’re happy. Sometimes they’re songs. Sometimes they’re glimpses. Sometimes they’re even smells. Sometimes they’re a penny on the pavement.

The next time you find a penny in your path, don’t think of it as good luck. Think of it as a sign.

Someone’s thinking of you. So smile.

Email features columnist Mandy Flynn at [email protected].