At a cultural awareness meeting at work last month, we had 30 seconds to draw both sides of a penny from memory. Several people had a relatively accurate depiction, and many others were creatively, hilariously, off-the-wall wrong. (Mine was surprisingly close to accurate, I was quite proud of myself!).
Because my brain tends to process info in strange little loops, my thought process quickly changed from the American penny as a cultural icon to the American penny as a good luck charm. And from there, of course. the topic broadened into a full-on contemplation of identified tokens of impending good fortune.
Think about it. We have:
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Find a penny, pick it up
and all day you'll have good luck! |
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My beautiful grandma
at her 90th birthday |
My personal favorite, however, is the green m&m...
I don't know how well-known the Lucky Green m&m actually is, but when I first heard about it at age 11, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was in the musical production Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and during the song 'Pure Imagination' the cast members danced around as various pieces of candy. Ross was a Tootsie Roll; I was a green m&m. One of the older cast members, a narrator, told me about the "lucky" value of a green m&m. I took her word for gold and didn't even ask her where she heard such a thing. To this day, I still catch myself countng how many greens are in a pack of m&ms. Christmas is a particularly exciting time, with bowls full of reds and lucky greens!!
