I laughed until I cried

Reading you guys' and gals' comments about the disease, I thought to share my obsession with you. Usually at Christmas I prepare a gift for a young blind friend. The gift consists of a whatsoever assortment of coins, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves and now a variety of four dollar coins, Presidential, Susan B.s, Sacs and Ikes for novelty sake. Then I throw in maybe fifty dollars so in $1 bills. Ray loves his gift and looks forward with great joy to receiving his present. He spends the entire day discovering the contents, sorting and counting his coins. In addition, upon discovering a coin not encountered before, he is forced to inquire of others just what is this new coin all about. If you have ever had the joy of searching an "unsearched" 5000 coin bag of Lincoln Cents you have shared Ray's annual Christmas experience.

Last Christmas I went to the bank to purchase an assortment

of coins, that I had not accumulated doing the year, to include in the mix. Usally there is an ample suppy, since there is that tendency, that's part of our disease, to be both a collector and an accumulator.

(Someone asked on the PCGS Coin Forum, how does one know when to seriously consider that you have nusimaticmania. Various

symptoms were suggested from pausing at the checkout counter while examining your change to checking out your pocket change with a loop. My phobia is so advanced that not only do I check out all my pocket coins, I grade it too. In the process, one even expects to find meaningful varieties. But the symptomatology need not be explained to the afflicted.)

Last Christmas I was short on half dollars and went to the bank to aquire some. The teller brought out this old brown wrapper that dates back to years ago when halves regularly appeared in circulation. I thought it odd but shrugged it off without too much attention to the details until I went to pick up the roll. It was so comparatively heavy that it slipped right out of my unspecting hands and went crashing to the marble floor. The pack split completely open and twenty of the most beautiful Walking Liberty and Franklin silver half dollars laid in a gorgeous heap upon the floor.

Now the problem! I had purchased these coins as part of Ray's gift and as such, they now rightfully belonged to him and not to me. What a precious moral and ethical dilemma for an unrepentant nusimaticmanic! "These are the times that try men's souls."

Ray could not discriminate, except by weight, these silver halves from any others. Furthermore, there was no member of his household who could exploit the nusimismatic largess that had befallen their household. (The first time I gave Ray a monetary gift for Christmas, it was in the form of $100 dollar bills. Later his sister reported to me that those bills were the largest that had come into their home in a month of Sundays.) Likewise no one in the home had the savvy to exchange these coin in the market place at their true value. Therefore, what to do? Let these coins be used as ordinary half dollars or to use one's knowledge and make sure that their value was realized. Certainly the person who had deposited them had no idea of what they were doing. Would a numismatist allow the error to reap itself? Rightly or wrongly, I decided not to give the silver halves to a blind person as just another piece of the ordinary coinage.

Instead, I purchased the coins from Ray by increasing the amount I had intended to give to him by an additional $90, paying him about $4.50 for each of the silver halves. I sought the opinion of my wife, a "good woman," who has devoted her entire adult life in service to handicapped individuals and she thought my approach to be fair. Meanwhile, she marveled at the fact that in

attempting "to give," I had in fact "received." But the receiving did not stop there. In February, I was in the same bank and thought to inquire again as to whether or not they had any half dollar rolls. The teller said, "yes" but she had problems opening the safe under the till. I waited patiently while she seemingly "cracked the safe." When the safe was open. she said, "How many rolls do you want?"

Hoping that lighting would strike twice in the same place, I sheepishly answered, "One roll!" She complied handing me another roll wrapped exactly like the one I had received at Christmas for Ray's gift. I cracked if open and lo and behold, it was another complete roll of silver Walking Libertys and Fraklin halves. I couldn't believe the good fortune. But this time, I was not about to be as numismatically stupid as I had been two months ago and I asked, "How many more of these rolls do you have?"

Her reply was "Eight!"

I had just deposited all the cash I had because I still owed Doug Winter Numismatic, $5,000 on a $12,500 purchased 1849-D, NGC MS-63 CAC, gold dollar that I was purchasing from him to upgrade my #1, totally Mint State, Type I, Award Winning, (2006, 2007 and 2008) gold dollar, registry set. I asked the teller would she please "Put those eight rolls on hold while I went back home to write a check and returned to purchase them."

She said, "Yes!" which was not unsual since I have been a customer for the last 40 years at this New York City bank.

(Not that she would know this since she was only about 30 years old.)

Needless to say, I returned ten minute later and purchased the eight rolls. As suspected, these also were solid Walking Liberty and Franklin Half rolls. In short for an initial outlay of $90, about $1000 worth of silver was purchased at my local bank in these transactions. Today beleive it or not, I asked again and received another roll of solid silver halves from the same bank.

How is CAS ever going to cure us of the disease if we keep on having so much fun like this!