Penny Lover

"Find a penny, pick it up, and all day you'll have good luck!"


Maybe it was this little expression that first caused me to place so much more value on a penny than one cent. If it can bring good luck just by picking it up, what other amazing things could happen after that?
Penny loafers were in style when I was in elementary school. Every one had them, but no one put a penny in them. I thought they should come with a penny in them if they were called penny loafers.

My dad had a Lionel Richie phase at one time and I loved to sing Penny Lover.
Pennies were also popping up in several other songs and expressions here and there, in my piggy bank and sprinkled all around for any one to pick up...

"Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes!"

Because adults were always discarding them, they were always in abundance.  My parents had a huge collection of pennies in their closet. Look at all this money, I thought,  just sitting here....
My sister and I played with it sometimes in our make-believe games. I think all kids do that. It's the only money you're really allowed to play with, touch and have control over--the stray dogs of money, the rejects. Your parents tell you that it is "so dirty," and that makes it even better somehow. You're willing to get your hands dirty. You'll never forget the smell of pennies on your hands, the feel of a hand-full squeezed in your grip, the sliding and the pinching, the sound of the raining down of pennies, buttons, carpet fuzz, and pet hair.

When I was about 7, my cousin and I decided that we were going to start a charity that would help all of our neighbors. We filled tube socks with pennies and walked down the street sprinkling a few shiny coins into each mailbox. We got a big, scary lecture when our moms caught us. We were told we had committed a federal offense and could serve prison time. Apparently, pennies are very serious business that you can't just go around passing out for free. ;)

We had a pool in the back yard of my childhood home. My sister, my cousins, and I used to love to walk out to the front drive and sit on the warm asphalt on our towels and eat a snack. One time, I had some pennies left over from our 7-11 candy purchase, and it happened that my pennies fit perfectly into a small hole in our driveway. I became fixated on this perfect fit and began placing pennies in all of the holes in our driveway. Then, it occurred to me that I could go to prison for this. This giving stuff is hard work that involves a lot of red tape. I covered each deposit with a Band-aid, and I felt like I had given back to the earth in some small and strange way. This time, I decided, it would have to be a secret.
My very first crime, a civil disobedience, had been committed.

"Here's a penny for your thoughts, a quarter for your call and all of your momma's love."

Captive Audience

I had to go to prison to get my foot in the door at Connors. Extreme, yes, but I had been teaching at Bacone for a year, so I felt prepared.  Teaching at Bacone made me get tough. Sometimes I felt like I was in the movie Dangerous Minds...which was a bit unexpected since it is a Christian university. I was teaching a lot more classes than an adjunct instructor typically does because Bacone operates under its own rules as a private school. I had 18 credit hours of day and night classes. One particular night class was full of rowdy football players who were pretty much convinced that they were too cool for school. It was a challenge, to say the least, to keep their attention, to keep them in line and, as one of the most unpopular instructors with the athletes, to feel safe walking to my car at night with no security and no lights. By the time I left Bacone, I knew how to wear my game face, how to get respect as a young female instructor and how to shut down any attempts at leveling or sexual advancement. Only after I learned those things could I even hope to reach some of them through writing assignments and discussion of literature.

Compared to my experience at Bacone, Eddie Warrior Correctional Center was friendly. First of all, it is a women's prison. Second of all, only the best behaved inmates can enroll. That's not to say that I didn't have some students who needed to be removed. It was a little difficult for me to push out of my mind that some of these ladies were guilty of crimes I couldn't imagine, but I did push it out. I forced myself to turn a blind eye to my visions of being attacked with a pencil or being dangled from the 2nd floor window.

After I graded their first essays, my perception of the world changed. Most of them wrote very emotional stories about how they came to be in prison and how they missed their children. I came to see them as women...women who had made some very big mistakes. Some of these women were girls, not yet 20 years old.  I felt very blessed to have had such supportive parents who always did their best to protect me from myself and from any danger they had the foresight to help me avoid. Still, as I look back, there were times in my teenage years when I put myself in situations that could have led me down a path of destruction. I couldn't help but see that every one, even Martha Stewart, is just one big mistake away from being inmate number 0001-2345.

Behind every tough girl's eyes, there was pain.

They were ready to make a change in their lives. They were tired of failing, tired of drug addiction and tired of their cycles of abuse. They were fiercely determined to soak in every lecture. They participated passionately in every discussion. They worked on each essay like it was the most important thing they'd ever done. They were coming to the realization that they were in fact good enough, smart enough, and fully capable of success. I've never seen eyes like theirs before or since.

I came away feeling like they educated me more than I had them. I learned compassion, humility and gratitude in a most unlikely place, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.