Money Around the World

I love our neighborhood and I love our neighbors. Our neighborhood is quiet, pretty, and mostly shady. Um, shady like full of big, shade-giving trees, not full of  big, drug dealing thieves.  It’s a nice, quiet neighborhood that happens to not be a through street between the nearby major streets. One block over, people speed away because it’s a through street. But not ours. Our street is calm and quiet, safe and pretty.

Anyway BB likes to race from one end of the block to the other on his scooter, and I have to time him. His goal is to shave a full second off his time every time he goes scootering. This one particular day, one of our neighbors stopped him and asked if collects stamps. Okay, contrary to what you see in your head, this stamp-collecting neighbor isn’t old. He’s older than me, but not by more than about 15 years.

BB does not collect stamps and very nicely told him so. Neighbor K then asked if he collects anything. My very interesting son didn’t say the obvious (Legos!) but said that he collects metal things that he finds lying around. It’s true. He has nuts, bolts, washers, flattened coins. He has little charms from charm bracelets, old keys, and even an ancient rusty beer can he found while we were hiking. I have no idea what his fascination is with old metal stuff. but I do get how fun it can be to collect.

So Neighbor K says:

Metal things, huh? Well, I have to clean out my garage and if I find anything metal, I’ll make sure to bring it to you.

A couple of hours later, he did bring some metal stuff to BB. A Ziplock bag full of coins from around the world. Apparently Neighbor K is a world traveler and just kept coinage from the places he visited. But now he’s done with these coins and he’s passed them on to my metal collecting kid.

BB is having a great time with all these coins. He’s separating them, sorting them, trying to figure out where they’re from, choosing is favorite pieces. I mean, he’s loving this!

So many pretty metal things!

Coins with holes in them…even square coins!

Even really old coins (this one is from 1938)

Thank you, Neighbor K. I suspect you have unwittingly given a focus to BB’s metal collection.