Thalia and the Queen
©2006, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.
It started with a simple penny.
Rosemary came downstairs to the home office and presented me with one of Thalia’s piggy banks, well, actually, a doggie bank, that had just broken. Being made of that cheap composite material that resembles plastic but isn’t quite that, and is impervious to all known cements, I knew it was a total loss.
"She and Kieran were rough-housing and one of them knocked it over. She seems to be taking it pretty well."
True enough; I hadn’t heard any impassioned crying coming from upstairs.
"I brought it down here because we got most of the money out of it," Rosemary explained, "but I can’t get the last few coins out of it."
That was a design flaw that was common to all of our kids’ banks. Whether traditionally piggy shaped or not, they consistently held fast to a couple of coins in places that I could not reach. This dog bank had a few lodged in the foot. I couldn’t tell by sound alone whether they were worth retrieving.
"Don’t let Thalia come downstairs," I decided, looking for the hammer. Rosemary returned and I took the somewhat unnerving action of smashing what was left of the doggy bank. The coins were liberated after a few strikes.
Rats, just a nickel and three pennies, hardly worth retrieving. I put them aside and quickly disposed of the remains of the bank. Then I picked up the coins again.
Many years ago, I was a coin collector, and although I largely gave it up after I started college, I still had the habit of looking at my change to see if there was anything interesting. It was still, after all, theoretically possible that not every 1955 double die error one cent coin had been found.
The nickel was nothing of interest, nor were two of the pennies, but the third was at least a bit unusual. A 1959-D. Considering it had been minted twenty seven years previously, it was in pretty good shape. Coin dealers wouldn’t be impressed, but I thought my daughter might be.
I brought it upstairs and presented it to her. "Look, Thalia, it’s a Memorial Cent, from the first year they were made."
"What’s a Memorial Cent?"
A perfectly good question, but I didn’t completely expect it; why, I have no idea. "Well… let me see… OK, look at the back. Do you see what that is?"
"No."
"Do you remember when we went to Washington, and we went to the place where you climbed all of those steps, and there was a big statue of Abraham Lincoln?"
"Yes!" she smiled.
"OK, that building is called the Lincoln Memorial." And it is on this penny. Before that, there were Wheat Cents."
"You mean, cents made out of wheat?"
"No," I said, trying to stifle a laugh. I guess I walked right into that one. "Those are pennies that have wheat ears on them. At least they are supposed to look like wheat." An unnecessary editorial comment, perhaps. "They were made until 1958, and in 1959, the year this coin was made, they changed the back."
"I have lots of pennies…" Thalia began, but my thoughts drifted off. I was probably a little older when I got my first coin collecting folder, but it’s said that kids grow up faster these days. Our daughter was a pretty mature five year old. Perhaps…
I checked my watch. It was four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon. There was time, if I moved quickly.
"I’ll be right back," I suddenly announced, and went for the car. Fifteen minutes later I was back with two Whitman Coin Folders from a local hobby shop. That was one difference between my time and hers—one now needed two folders to hold all of the Memorial Cents.
"Look, Thalia," I explained, "We can look through all of your pennies and put some of them in these folders. There are places for all of the different years and mint marks."
"What are mint marks?"
"See, your 1959 Memorial Cent has a 'D'. That stands for Denver. That’s where it was made. If it doesn’t have a mark, it was made in Philadelphia. If it has a 'S', it was made in San Francisco."
I suppose you’re wondering what this has to do with a Queen, but we’re getting there.
The contents of the dear departed doggie bank had not been put into Thalia’s other coin bank, so we began with those. I helped Thalia separate all of the pennies from the other coins, and then we began examining the cents in earnest. I very rapidly learned another difference between then and now—I couldn’t read the dates without my glasses, and as usual, I couldn’t find any of my three pairs that were somewhere around the house. So I let Thalia have at it.
About halfway through the pile, Thalia handed me a copper colored coin and said, "What’s this?"
It was a penny alright, but not with a Memorial or with stylized wheat stalks, but with maple leaves. We lived close enough to the northern border to get these all the time—Canadian cents. Most people weren’t enamored of this, given that they were worth less than a United States penny and some merchants were sharp-eyed enough to refuse them. But the long dormant coin collector in me never really minded.
And of course, you probably know what the obverse of a Canadian penny looks like.
"Who’s that?" Thalia asked as I turned the coin over back to front.
"That’s Queen Elizabeth."
Our daughter smiled the wide smile that sometimes only seems possible at the age of five. "Elizabeth? I’m Elizabeth!"
Very true; our daughter’s middle name is, in fact, Elizabeth.
"Wow, a Queen with my name," Thalia said proudly.
"Well, actually, you have her name," I attempted to explain using the proper chronology. "...ah, never mind."
We continued sorting through the pennies, finding more than a few to fill holes in the folders, as almost always happens when first starting a collection, but Thalia Elizabeth seemed to get much more excited when we found a penny with the Queen instead of the President on the front.
"Look, it’s Queen Elizabeth!" she would proclaim. One of the Canadian cents we found dated back to the original portrait of Her Majesty, and Thalia wanted to make sure that we kept it with the others. Then I surprised her by going to our stash of Canadian coins that we kept for our trips across the border and showing her some other pieces that carried the image of Queen Elizabeth as well.
During the next week, father and daughter went through nearly all of the pennies that were in the house and filled a number of spots in the penny folders. We also found a number of Canadian pennies, which made Thalia very happy. She wanted a place to save those as well.
I knew of a coin and stamp shop in town that I hadn’t been to since a fruitless effort to get my son interested in stamp collecting, and I thought it might be fun to bring her to see some other coins of the world, and pick up a few "2 x 2" holders for her favorite coins from North of the Border.
We arrived on a Saturday afternoon with almost no time left in the store’s hours of operation, but the owners assured us that they didn’t close until the last customer left, no matter how small she might be.
Thalia took a tall chair, moved it over to a bin of inexpensive foreign coins, climbed up and sat down, then went right to the matter. About five seconds later she found something she wanted.
"Look, it’s Queen Elizabeth!" she said excitedly. "But it’s not from Canada."
"That coin is from Great Britain, which is where Queen Elizabeth lives." I looked at the back. "It is ten new pence."
"Ten cents?"
"No, dear, they don’t use cents in England." It would be interesting to explain that to a five year old, but why not? She constantly surprised me with her ability to learn, and I sometimes felt guilty that I had not tried to teach her as much as I could have.
I found an older British coin which turned out to be from my birth year. "See, this is a shilling, and it is the way the English used to have money," I told her. I hoped I would recall the way that system worked. "But see who’s on the front?"
"Queen Elizabeth!"
"Very good!" the proprietor said from behind the counter. "You know your monarchs!"
"Look, here she is again!" Thalia said, handing me a large copper dated 1964. "What is this?"
"This is a penny," I replied.
"No, it’s not, it’s too big!"
"Pennies are worth more in Great Britain than they are in the United States."
"No they’re not!" she said incredulously, as if I were kidding.
"Yes, they are! They used to count pennies differently then."
She looked at me with her "Miss Chievous" expression, and I realized that maybe she was kidding, and really did understand.
"They even have half pennies!"
"No, they don’t! How can you cut a penny in half?"
Time to start explicating the old Sterling system? Maybe not just yet.
"I’ll try to show you." I browsed through a large binder of other coins for sale and fortunately came up with one without much delay.
"See, it says so right on it, 'Half Penny.' And," I added, turning over the coin, "this one has Queen Elizabeth’s father on it." That would be George VI.
"Queen Elizabeth’s father?" she said in wonderment.
"Yes, he was King before Elizabeth was Queen," I replied. "Do you want to know more about them?"
"Yes," she said.
We picked out a few more coins from the bin, asked for a few plastic pages and some 2x2s, and I let Thalia pay for the purchase with a five dollar bill from my wallet. The owners gave her change, and made sure I knew that included a Buffalo Nickel and an Indian Head Penny, which both she and her father very much appreciated, and is the subject of another story to which we will return another time.
We had enough time to visit the city library, and made two stops. First, we visited the video section, where I typed in "Queen Elizabeth," secured some subject matches, and went to the shelves with the call number mentally noted. I checked out a few tapes and a DVD about the Royal Family, and then we headed to the Children’s Section. I was a bit surprised to find that there were actually more books about Elizabeth I than Elizabeth II, but there was a "Young Reader" volume that would be perfect for a before bedtime story.
We returned home and Thalia Elizabeth happily reported to her mother that she found all kinds of coins with Queen Elizabeth on them.
"You did?" Rosemary said. "That’s great! What fun!"
"And we bought a big penny with her on it too!"
She paused to show off her new coins, smiling all the while. She pointed out each one and then added, "We even saw a coin with Queen Elizabeth’s father on it."
"What was his name again?" she asked.
"Uh, it’s the same as your father’s name," Rosemary pointed out.
"It wasn’t Daddy!"
We all laughed.
I noticed that Rosemary’s laptop was powered up. "Well, let’s take a look. I’m sure that there is a website for Queen Elizabeth." And indeed, there was, the official site of the Royal Family. I put Thalia on my lap and we looked around. I read to her about when Elizabeth was a Princess, a little about her father, King George the Sixth, her husband Prince Philip, and her son the Prince of Wales, and quite a bit about Queen Elizabeth’s mother, the Queen Mother.
"She was a very special person for everyone in Great Britain," I told her. "She lived to be over one hundred years old. And she is also called Queen Elizabeth." We viewed the Memorial Gallery of pictures celebrating her life. Thalia especially liked the photo of her with her husband, King George VI and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. And when the photo of her at the christening of her great-grandson Prince William was displayed, I took a moment to tell Thalia about Princess Diana; which I found was still a little hard to talk about. I tried to be as gentle as I could.
And then it was back to Her Majesty’s web pages. "Look, Thalia, this is Buckingham Palace, this is where Queen Elizabeth lives." I showed her a few pictures. Through all of this, it still astounded me that I could be sharing all of this with my daughter in a way that would have been thought impossible even ten years ago, never mind when Her Majesty ascended to the throne in 1952. I made a mental note to send a thank-you for enabling the ability to share so much with my daughter from a humble kitchen near Rochester, New York. Her Majesty believed in sharing and openness from the time that she directed that her coronation be televised. I found a few pictures of that event on the website as well.
"She has been Queen for more than fifty years," I told her. "And, look, she is going to have a special birthday this year."
"We should make her a card!" Thalia exclaimed. "A Queen should have a birthday card!"
"Well, I think that she will get a lot of birthday cards," I replied. "You can see from the pictures that she loves children."
"Should I get her a present?"
"Oh, I don’t know… I think a card from you would make a wonderful present. But you have to make it yourself."
And I needed to find out how one would send a birthday card to Her Majesty; fortunately that information is posted right on the Royal Family’s website.
During the next week, we looked at parts of the videos and I read to Thalia Elizabeth from the book about Queen Elizabeth. About halfway through the volume we made an amazing discovery.
"Thalia, listen to this… when the Queen was a Princess, she was a Girl Guide! That’s what they call a Girl Scout in England! She had her own troop with her sister Princess Margaret and her cousins right in Buckingham Palace!"
Her eyes lit up the way only a five-year old’s can—a five year old beginning "Daisy" Girl Scout, for that matter.
"Queen Elizabeth was a Girl Scout! Queen Elizabeth was a Girl Scout! I don’t believe it! Mommy, come quick! I have to tell you! Queen Elizabeth was a Girl Scout!" Not surprisingly, we didn’t finish the book that day.
But a couple of days later, our daughter returned from a craft night at her elementary school with her promised card. "Happy Birthday Elizabeth, Love Thalia," it read, all in glitter glue on a royal purple piece of construction paper. And Thalia also made a flower with the glitter glue in a corner of the card. I took a picture of Thalia Elizabeth with her card so that "they can see who is sending the card," I explained. I was a little concerned that the proper protocol wasn’t exactly being observed, but I hoped Her Majesty would understand. There is no question that our family’s little princess meant her birthday wishes from the heart.
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In this writing, I mention that I would like to thank those who labored to develop and maintain the website for the Royal Family. This story is that thank you for helping to enrich and brighten our daughter’s life.
| George... and Thalia Elizabeth Postscript: Her Majesty received 20,000 (!) birthday cards, including Thalia's. She issued a general reply:
Post-Postscript: On 5 May 2006, Thalia (and her father!) received a personal thank you letter from Mrs. Phillipa de Pass, Lady in Waiting to Her Majesty. "The Queen wishes me to write and thank you for the splendid card which you have made for her on the occasion of her eightieth birthday," the letter began. Thalia also received a folder with information leaflets about The Queen and Royal Life. Our daughter has something that she will always treasure! Thank you! |
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