Coins in the Jar

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I am writing this on my father’s birthday, 27 years since his last one alive. Both kids are here—my son home from college, my daughter in her last summer before hers begins. Both kids are sleeping, my son after a 20-mile hike straight up into the sky that he woke up at 1am to drive to and do the right way, my daughter after seven hours of choir rehearsal and a massive math tournament she organized for schoolgirls from across the county.

Even the dog is asleep, snoring on the floor next to me.

I have been thinking lately about “coins in the jar.” I talk about this idea when I teach. Music exposure is all coins in the jar. No matter what, whether you practice every day or don’t touch your instrument until your lesson once a week, you are still improving. It may be slow, it may be fast, but every rep is another coin in the jar. You are better after than before, one way or another. The arc is only upward.

It’s a quaint phrase; coin jars seem like a relic of the pre-Apple Pay age. But the idea holds.

Coin jars actually turn out to hold a spot in my internal landscape. I grew up spending every other weekend with dad in his smoky Rego Park, NY apartment. Ever few visits we would undertake one of my favorite rituals: he’d dump his coin bowls and jars onto his living room coffee table, and we’d carefully count out stacks of quarters, dimes, nickels (the most annoying ones), and pennies—but not the wheat pennies or the odd-colored silver coins; those he kept aside and gave to me in case any turned out to be valuable.

He showed me how to plug one end of the paper coin wrapper with my finger while loading the coins into the tube, to straighten any coins that went in sideways, and to fold the ends to secure the cargo when the target value was reached in each roll.

I loved coin day. No other grown-ups in my family did it, so it felt very dad-specific. And that also meant that no other kids in my family got to do it, so it felt me-specific, too.

In a literal way, it was coins in the jar. But it was also this in the metaphorical way. Each of those smoky, dirty-fingered Sunday mornings around the living room table was one more “dad moment,” and it left me bigger for it. It didn’t matter if it was every visit or every fifth visit; every time was another coin in the jar. The arc was only upward.

I have tried to build a life built of coins in the jar. Good experiences and interactions add to the bank. Bad ones deplete it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become far stingier about who or what I spend any “bad” coins on. We only get so much time on this space ball, and we don’t owe anyone our spiritual poverty. So, I try only to draw out coins—that is, lose time on negative thoughts or interactions—when the option to save isn’t apparent. I don’t always succeed. But the arc is upward.

Time with my kids is the ultimate “coins in the bank.” Every interaction leaves me feeling richer for getting to have it. Though I never meant to hand this particular legacy down, my own kids, too, have a “dad house” and a “mom house.” I certainly hope that their time with me is coins in their jars. But I know for sure that time with them fills mine.

In fact, only through them did I realize that those coin days meant as much to my dad as they did to me. After all, it’s not like those jars and bowls full of coins didn’t exist between my visits there. Yet somehow, they only needed wrapping on occasional Sundays that happened to coincide with my visits.

The nest empties this fall. Of everything I have ever done, getting to be my kids’ dad has been the best. I know it doesn’t stop when they move on. But like my students who only play the piano at the next lesson, the time between the deposits inevitably slows down. The arc is only upward, but the pace changes.

This is as it should be. They have their own paths to carve, as I did and as we all do.

So, as I write this, my son fresh from one of his beloved epic hikes, my daughter off of yet another in a string of smashing weekend successes, the three of us together for the last summer before the birds fly away, I notice two things. One is how full my jar feels in this last stretch with them. But the other is how full their full jars make me. They are building lives of wonder and satisfaction. Their arc is upward. Their jars are filling. That makes mine feel fuller still.

And it fills me with hope that perhaps I left dad’s jar a little fuller before he began his last journey, 27 years ago, just as he did mine.

This months’ Unsolicited Advice is simply this: fill the jar. Find what you love and do it. Then keep doing it. A lot or a little, it still fills the jar. Then don’t spend those coins unless you have to. You won’t always succeed, but you can bend the arc upward.

And finally, if possible, aim to be the coins in the jars of those around you as well.

Even the snoring dog.

Okay, especially the dog.

Josh Weinstein is an SDMA-winning songwriter, arranger, producer, and pianist/organist/keyboard player originally from New York. He holds a Ph.D. in music and teaches college and private lessons across a variety of disciplines. His dog is way cooler than he is.