Mark's Pages

April 16, 2003:

In 1963 my grandfather gave me a 41-year-old Peace silver dollar in mint condition. I was six. He told me, "Keep this in your pocket until you wear it smooth."

I know next to nothing about him. We met just twice before I became estranged from my parents and, by extension, their relatives. I wish now that I possessed more details to connect with his gift because what I do know of him is inspiring. He spent his adult life, as a rancher in rural Montana, organizing against war.

For him this choice was ethical, I think, rather than political. He returned from World War Two with a moral opposition to all violence. Through his church and his community he organized against the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and also against our government's innumerable small-scale interventions the world over. He died in 1980, before the Reagan administration's vicious state-terrorist policies matured. He would surely have contributed a strong heartland voice against Reagan's Contras.

I've carried his gift, as he asked, for forty years. The coin now shows considerable wear, all of it mine. On the obverse, Liberty's hair has lost detail, and the legend "IN GOD WE TRVST" is invisible from certain angles. On the reverse, the eagle's feathers are no longer differentiated; the words "E PLURIBUS UNUM" are nearly gone; and there's just a faint hint of the word "PEACE" remaining.

I feel an immense emotional, even spiritual attachment to this object. Not, I think, because of its personal connection to my grandfather, who I barely knew and never felt close to. More for the many layers of symbolic resonance it carries. That he was a "heartland" American and World War Two veteran. That he maintained a steadfast moral witness against war and violence his entire adult life. That it connects me in a material way to my childhood. I wonder if this isn't what people in earlier centuries meant by "magic"?

Ocean Beach Pier, summer. Peach-colored girl laughs her characteristic laugh, head thrown back in a gesture sending joy heavenward. Thick blonde hair in a Mod's rocker-girl layer cut. From her left ear, a dangling earring made of an old silver pendant from the

"Let me hold it!" she says, mischievousness playing on laughing lips.

No, no, you won't let her hold it. In her destructiveness, her almighty drive to prove that, no matter what else may happen, she possesses the power to cause real harm, she'd throw it right off that pier into the sea, and there it'd be lost, along with all the other parts of you she'd already broken during that long, lonely summer of conflict and failure.

Laughing, her earring dangles. "Let me hold it!" she says, laughing.

No, no you won't...

Many times while marching I find myself absently turning it in my pocket, as though by simply touching an old coin I were connecting myself to a moral tradition that reaches back beyond my own life, my personal existence, into longer centuries of witness and struggle. This is something uniquely spiritual about humans, I think. Despite our evil, we sometimes struggle for the good. May Life look kindly on our efforts.