Pennies are not meant to go unclaimed. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in many years of life, this one will carry on from 6th grade toward forever.

When I got bumped to the brand-new school from the old elementary in my neighborhood, I think I was excited. Frankly, I don’t remember how I felt when some of my old friends got to stay behind, and I got to go ahead to that place everybody was talking about. All I knew for sure was that the playground and the classrooms and the steps I’d perched upon for group pictures for the last five years were giving way to something just built and made ready for its first students.

Well, the liberation made me – a pretty timid kid – a little wild that year. I’m sure my mother thought the teacher didn’t help with all that expressed energy. (Thank goodness no one called my house when my best friend and I got caught chasing each other in the girls’ locker room. Those circular showers were too amazing to leave alone. )

My 6th grade teacher wasn’t like anyone I’d known before. Even though she smelled like strange perfume, she seemed to be a friend – a smart friend. And, she got pretty tough with her new class a lot.

She made us do crazy things – like stand next to our desks during language arts class and sing a song about, “There is never a subject, there is never a subject. . . .” She required us all to make poetry notebooks. She demanded we diagram sentences to figure out what parts of speech went where on lines and angles. She talked lovingly about her own son and daughter, and she treated us like a big family of important people ready to find themselves as grownups (all too soon).

Looking back over more years than I knew to add up in those days, I do remember some important lessons that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to a 6th grader in the early 1960’s. One of them was the value of one plain old penny.

A penny somehow got lost on the parking lot where we played, and landed where everyone would probably see it – loose and free from pocket or purse.

The first person who took the time to pick up the single one-cent coin and make it his or her own had greater rewards waiting. The penny picker spent the rest of the year collecting more pennies . . . which were matched in dollar amount by a brand-new teacher with a penchant for sharing lessons that could last a lifetime.

It’s wasn’t me who found the penny. But like every other kid who figured out along the way what it all added up to, I always look.