What am I supposed to do with my old foreign coins?

I developed a sentimental attachment to them when a coin shop offered to buy them by the pound

This winter I made a concerted, and frankly impressive, effort to purge our basement of ancient files.

I found it a challenge any longer to make the argument that the voluminous notes I took for, say, a New York magazine story circa 1998 continued to enjoy any relevance.

So after leafing through the mildewed papers, I’d bid them a fond farewell and dump them in the trash to be recycled. That housekeeping exorcism almost extended to a large bag of foreign currency — both coins and paper notes — that long ago had been retired from circulation by their respective nations.

But wait! I recently paid a visit to a coin shop in Albany, N.Y., to get some silver dollars appraised. While there, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the store also buys obsolete foreign currency, by the pound.

I say surprised because I was baffled why anybody would want coins that wouldn’t even buy you a cup of coffee in their native land. But the coin store representative with whom I consulted explained that people, children in particular, collect tarnished old francs, marks, pence, pfennig, etc. Coin collecting enjoyed a resurgence during the pandemic.

He went on to describe the money — maybe I’m romanticizing just a bit — as miniature metal passports to foreign countries, tiny self-contained geography lessons; the images of the kings, queens, presidents and favorite farm animals serving as magic carpet rides to exotic cultures.

Suddenly, I was suffused with an uncharacteristic sensation of selflessness: If all I had to do to help spark a local kid’s fascination with the wider world, especially given the tribalism and isolationism in which large segments of American culture currently finds itself awash, it became my solemn responsibility to contribute my worthless coins to the greater good. Especially since I’d already weeded out the silver ones.

But as I grabbed the dusty bag of currency I was seized by sentimentality. It occurred to me that these tarnished relics told a story — my story. I’d been traveling abroad since childhood and I’d likely acquired the large 1929 British penny with the likeness of George V on an inaugural visit to London in 1961, or the flimsy aluminum 5-lira coin later that same summer in Italy.

The provenance of some of the coins left me baffled. I’ve never been to China or India; neither had my parents or any other immediate family members. Yet I possessed coins from each in several denominations. Paper notes as well. How did they seep into my change? Were they gifts from people who had traveled there?

And then there was the added problem that some of these coins might still possess purchasing power. South African rands or Hungarian forints, for instance. I don’t know if and when I’ll return to South Africa. And Hungary, as beautiful as Budapest and especially its bathhouses, doesn’t seem all that appealing a destination as long as Viktor Orban remains in power.

That’s the weird thing about money. We imbue it with mystical power. But that’s only because we’ve reached consensus that it possesses some. There’s nothing as passé as a retired, though lovely, Republique Francaise 5-franc piece or, rather less so, an Italian 10,000 lira note after Europe adopted a common currency, the Euro, in 1999. The move doomed the eurozone’s national currencies to irrelevance.

Kudos to Switzerland, and the United States for that matter, for having left their currency systems unchanged for generations. The Swiss franc — neither the appearance nor the denominations of their coinage — has evolved since my first visit there in the 1960s. One can take confidence in knowing that the coins left over from your last visit, or even your first, retain their full value and await your return.

They also signify economic and cultural stability. When the U.S. dollar is withdrawn from circulation and replaced by the Trump note you’ll know we’re in serious trouble. The only remaining relevance — besides their marginal melt value — to coins that no longer buy anything is to tug at the heartstrings of memory.

A 12-sided British threepence coin reminds me of a visit to Ireland in the disastrous summer of 1961. I say disastrous because that’s when I discovered the sublimity of Cadbury Dairy Milk and Flake bars and blew my entire summer’s wad — five bucks — in the first week. I was reduced to begging my parents for money for the rest of that long, hot summer.

Post-war “old” French francs were still in circulation when I traveled through the south of France with my friend Steve Bauer in the summer of 1971. However, we discovered how profoundly worthless they were one afternoon in Aix-en-Provence when we tried to leave a mountain of old franc coins as a tip for our waiter. Together, they amounted to a normal tip, or so we thought. Our waiter appraised them for us free of charge by picking them up and throwing them in our face.

I found a few of those in the bag, too. Not the same ones. We beat a hasty retreat from the café.

As much as I want to breath new life into my old coins by passing them on to deserving children is there any possible way they could mean as much to them as they do to me?