Within the next few years the Treasury Department will do away with pennies, which currently cost more to make than they’re worth. One day soon the price of an item will be either $3.95 or $4.00, but it will no longer be $3.99. Our smallest coin will be a nickel. Despite piggy banks, by 2050 we may have gotten rid of coins altogether, except for diehard collectors to trade.

Given the bleak future of our copper centavo, Andrew Hiller’s elegy for the penny is worth a dime of your time. For one, Hiller fits half a dozen clever sayings about pennies into his drop-in, such as “pennies from Heaven,” “a penny saved is a penny earned” and “a penny for your thoughts.” If the one-cent piece is on the way out, can penny-candy sayings be far behind? Pop culture in these here United States will suffer disproportionately when the penny goes the way of the stagecoach and the Model T Ford.

One notable quirk about these coins that bear Abe Lincoln’s profile on the front and, in honor of Lincoln’s 200th birthday in 2009, the Union Shield on the back: nowhere is the word “penny” visible, though “God” and “Liberty” are stamped in metal. Another quirk is the one Hiller stresses: Americans hate pennies. We say, “Keep the change” to salespeople; we leave pennies on the sidewalk where somebody dropped them; we toss them into fountains and wells, wishing for—what? Millions of pennies transformed into paper currency!

Hiller waxes philosophical when he pays attention to the lowly penny as a symbol: “We need to find a way to value the penny again, to value each insubstantial moment because when looking back it is often the littlest things that we miss most. Life is not usually about the big deal but that crucial moment. . . .That’s my two cents anyway.”