Monetary Mysteries

    You know I gotta confess my Dad told me A LOT of stuff. I mean, A LOT. (This could be material for many slices) but writing on the back of snapshots, or identifying photos with subject, and dates seemed to blow right by me.

     Yet I thought of him yesterday and had to chuckle to myself ruefully. I was going over my uncle's coin collection with coolest app on my phone in complete amazement. It was so much fun, so easy, as the app scanned each coin with my camera, recognized, and gave its' value. 

   My uncle had kept a coin collection in the 1930's and when we were cleaning out my grandparent's home, and my uncle had also passed, no one in the family wanted it. 

   I grabbed it.

   It's not exactly unmarked photographs but there were some mysteries surrounding some of the coins.

   There were so many foreign coins from the late 1800's. The foreign coins from the 1940's were easy to explain; my father had brought those home during the war.

   It left me to ponder. Had my grandfather's colleagues, or patients brought him coins from their travels abroad? My grandfather was a doctor and surgeon for 35 years at a very large hospital in Durham, North Carolina. How had my Uncle Stephen come by these older European coins? My Uncle Stephen's own life was fraught with battles with mental illness. 

   I couldn't help but just wonder as to the stories as to how he might have came by an Indian Rupee from 1841, or even a Japanese Yen from 1870?

   Even as I put the Whitman's Sampler box away carefully my curiosity was abound. I traced his scrawly handwriting on the cover absentmindedly with my finger. I also hoped Uncle Stephen didn't mind that it was me who had "touched" his box- despite his strict directions not to.