By the way, her real name is Jean. When I was little and just learning to talk, I couldn't say Jean, so I said DeeDee and the name stuck. So I can actually say that I named my aunt, who is thirty years my senior.
When I am out riding my bicycle I am always seeing pennies lying in the street. Sometimes I think about stopping to pick them up, but with an 18-speed bicycle to deal with it is not an easy task. I will stop and pick up silver coins, and struggle to restart myself in high gear. I just cannot ride past a quarter, so I continue to do this. And often it is only a dime or nickel, but they all look like quarters at speed and from that height.
Should I stop and pick up the pennies too? Probably. If I did so, and saved them, I might be rich someday. But it would make much more sense to stop and pick up the lead wheel weights and sell them to a recycler. Our streets are so badly pot-holed that I must pass a couple of pounds of lead each time I ride.
Besides pennies and wheel weights, I see a lot of nuts and bolts lying in the road. And I can't help but wonder what critical function they used to perform on the vehicle they fell off of. Sometimes I see so many nuts and bolts I think there must be a disabled car up ahead somewhere.
Which leads me back to pennies. Maybe, just maybe, pennies are associated with luck. It is good luck if you stop and pick them up. But if you ignore them, bad luck will befall you. And so starts another myth.
Supposing we were to postulate that driving over pennies causes automobile problems? What the hell, something causes cars to break or degrade for no apparent reason. So why not blame it on the pennies in the road, pennies that would bring good luck if we stopped to pick them up. We don't, so our luck sours. Driving over pennies brings bad luck. Picking up pennies brings good luck. Simple, isn't it?
Having begun this myth, let's refine it further. There will undoubtedly develop several schools of thought on this new myth. One school of thought might be that one or more of your tires must touch the penny in order for it to bring bad luck. This could explain why some people swerve around invisible objects for no apparent reason. They may just be trying to avoid hitting a penny in the road.
Another school of thought could be that the tire need not touch the penny, the car merely has to pass over the penny. This is less precise, but more attractive to physicists, who might suggest that a weak magnetic force associated with the penny interacts with the passing car. And they might also suggest that the more massive a car, the less the effect of the penny. This would explain why small cars break so easily, and might be justification for a plastic or fiberglass car, to reduce the magnetic influence.
A third school of thought might be that bad luck will occur if the shadow of your car passes over a penny. Associated with this school of thought is the apparent time delay between the time your shadow touches a penny and the time the problems occur. And this might explain why cars break down at night, although the shadows from the moon or streetlights are not as strong as those from the sun.
And let's not forget about karma. If someone intentionally throws a penny into the street, it should be them who suffer bad luck, not the cars driving over it. It's only fair. And perhaps if someone picks up a penny in the street, they should be immune from the effects of driving over other pennies. But only for a while, karma has its limits.
So there you have it, a new myth. Pass it along, and pick up those pennies!