So Long Old Friends. Rest In Peace.

On February 5, I wrote about my father’s silver dollars. He, along with three best friends, received them from one of the fathers for good luck before leaving for Europe in WWII. The father who gave them the coins gave each a second one upon their safe return. My father carried those coins until his death in 1979. I guarded them for a short while until someone broke into my car and stole them. I replaced them with a Liberty half and a Kennedy half. Like my dad’s silver dollars, the Liberty half wore flat, showing virtually no signs of being currency. The Kennedy half never wore at all and still clearly showed the mint date, 1967. I carried those coins with me every day … until Thursday, March 14, when they mysteriously and inexplicably disappeared.

I have no explanation for their disappearance. I put my pants on in the morning, reached into my front pocket, and they were gone. My folding money and car keys were there, only the coins vanished.

The theft of my father’s coins decades ago brought me to can’t-catch-my-breath tears. This disappearance didn’t. Instead, it feels cosmic and karmic, like the completion of some sort of circle. Thursday, March 14, would have been my father’s 108th birthday. I was in New Orleans –– by far my favorite city in the world –– with Rebecca, my brother Joe, and his partner, Marsharee, who has been a good friend for 53 years and who adored my father. Joe and Marsharee left that morning; it was the end of our time together. My father loved New Orleans too: he never stopped grinning when we sat together in gritty NOLA clubs listening to traditional jazz; he downed oysters on the half shell with the best of them; he visited me as an undergraduate every chance he got. At every JazzFest, his spirit visits me when I sit and listen to jazz at the Economy Hall stage and I get in a good, very loving cry.

I took my pants off before going to bed and put them back on in the morning. Somehow, in that span, the coins bolted, headed for some new home in New Orleans. Maybe I should be sad. Instead, I feel liberated. At 75, I have now shed another thing I don’t truly need. Instead of feeling a sense of loss, I feel a sense of completion. I did my job with those coins and my father’s memory. Now, something inexplicable has taken responsibility for them. I’ll think of them every time I put my hand in my pocket for the rest of my life, but I won’t miss them.

A Side Note
Domilise’s is a funky, hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop in Uptown New Orleans one block from the river. (At Annunciation and Bellecastle, in case you are visiting and want the best po-boy ever.) For years, one of my favorite sandwiches there was their hot pepper wiener … a spicy sausage of some unidentifiable origin. Upon returning one year, yearning for a hot pepper wiener po-boy, I learned that they, in the vernacular of New Orleans, “ain’t dere no more.” Domilise’s supplier stopped carrying them, and in their quest for quality, they could not find a replacement.

Domilise’s dealt with the loss in true New Orleans fashion: instead of removing the sandwich from the menu, they taped over “pepper weiner” and replaced it with this thought: “Rest in peace Pepper Weiner.” I reckon that sentiment has been on the menu in that form for 40 years or more. (And disregard all spelling discrepancies; it is New Orleans and it really doesn’t matter!)

I feel the same way about my half dollars: Rest in Peace!