Need One, Take One. Have One, Leave One

Cedar Valley News
August 4, 2026
Need One, Take One. Have One, Leave One
By George Khan

The rolls of pennies stopped coming. My supplier told me plainly, there are no more to send. The country has quit making them, and once the ones already out there wear thin, the penny is finished. A coin my grandparents carried, gone in one lifetime, and hardly a soul looked up to notice.

I keep a dish of them by my register. You know the kind. Need one, take one. Have one, leave one. My mother taped those words above it our first week in this country, in her own hand, and the tape is still there, yellow and curling at the corners. For thirty years I have refilled the dish without a thought. And the other night, wiping the counter at closing, I looked in and found one penny left. Face up.

And for the first time in longer than I can tell you, I looked at the face.

Lincoln. It is always Lincoln, and because it is always Lincoln, I had stopped seeing him, the way you stop seeing the pictures on your own walls. But there he was. One small copper face looking up at my deli ceiling, alone in a cracked plastic dish, stamped on the cheapest thing I own, the coin so little we keep it in a bowl only to give away.

And here is the thought which came, rag in hand.

Of all the faces we might have chosen for the coin nobody wanted, we picked the honest one.

Honest Abe, we called him. Nobody is sure anymore where the stories began, and I will not swear each is true. The long walk to hand back a few cents overcharged. The borrowed book worked off in labor. What matters is not whether each can be proven. A country tells such tales the way a family tells them about a grandfather, half memory and half wishing, and truer, somehow, for the telling. But we told them. And then we pressed the man in the stories into the smallest, plainest, most freely given-away coin in the drawer.

Whether anyone intended it or not, it came out exactly right.

Because honesty is a coin of the same make. The cheapest thing in the till. It costs a man nothing to hand across a counter. You can arrive on these shores with empty pockets, no English, not a dollar to your name, the way my family did, and carry a full supply just the same, because honesty was never a thing you had to afford. You can be flat broke and honest on the same afternoon. It is the one currency a newcomer is never short of.

My mother learned the language slowly and the register quickly, and this one thing she never had to learn. She had it, and hung it on the wall for the rest of us. For years I thought the tape was about pennies.

Because honesty is also the quiet thing holding the whole place upright. A country runs on people telling the truth in small rooms. The clerk who counts the change back true. The neighbor whose word you can build on. The man behind the counter who says the pastrami is a day old before he rings it up. None of it sits in any law. All of it is honesty, spent a little at a time, and never missed until it runs dry.

So we passed it hand to hand across our counters for a hundred years and never saw what we did. We thought we were giving away a coin. We were handing along the man on it.

The dish is nearly empty now. When the last one goes, I am keeping the tape. My mother hung it, and she is the reason any of this makes sense to me. Need one, take one. Have one, leave one.

I have decided she meant a great deal more than pennies. I think, now, she always did.

So take one when you are short. Leave one when you can. And whatever else you spend today, spend a little of the honest coin. We can still afford it. We could always afford it.

It was the whole point from the start.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. What is the honest coin you saw spent this week, or spent yourself? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the coin is real. The United States has ended production of the one-cent coin, with the last pennies struck in late two thousand twenty-five; billions remain in circulation as legal tender. Abraham Lincoln has appeared on the United States one-cent coin since nineteen oh nine, the first real person to appear on a regularly circulating American coin. The stories told of Lincoln’s honesty, including the young store clerk who walked miles to return a customer’s change, are part of American folk memory and are not all independently documented.

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