The year was 1970, It was my first day of Jr. High School and I was scared to death. I couldn’t find my locker, the upperclassmen were handing out “elevator passes” in our single story school, and I was pretty certain the “Mod Squad” lunch pail my mom had bought me was going to get my ass kicked.

At the Central Jr. High School in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, all students who arrived early were required to go to the gymnasium and wait for the bell that would dismiss us to go to our first class. Boys had to sit on one side of the gym and girls were required to sit on the other side. To this day, I can’t figure out what kind of trouble they thought we were going to get into if the two sexes were allowed to mingle for those 15 minutes prior to class.

It was on that first day of school that I became acquainted with the penny rollers.

Every morning, some unfortunate teacher was assigned the duty of monitoring the gymnasium. On occasion they would step outside for a few minutes, and it was during those brief unsupervised moments that the penny rollers began their game.

There was a small, dark haired, unkempt boy who attended my school whose name, I later learned, was Nathan. Whenever the teacher stepped out of the room, a small group of boys would begin rolling pennies across the gym floor and Nathan would scurry after them, picking them up and putting them into his pockets, while peels of laughter came from both sides of the gym.

No one seemed to know much about Nathan. Some kids said that his mother was dead. It was common knowledge, though, that his father sold junk for a living. You would often see Nathan riding around town with his father in a beat up old pickup loaded with refuse like a real life “Sanford and Son.” It was obvious that Nathan was poor; not the kind of poor that meant you couldn’t buy the latest fashions, but the kind of poor that made you willing to trade your dignity for a few pennies every morning.

The penny rollers continued their game for the next three school years. On occasion, when they caught Nathan in a restroom, they would throw coins in the commodes to see if he would fish them out. Often he did.

Nathan was in my ninth-grade algebra class. One day we had a substitute teacher who began class by calling roll. When he called Nathan’s name I heard a timid voice behind me say “here”. The sound of his voice startled me; not because it had an unusual timbre but because in that moment I realized I had known Nathan for three years and this was the first time I had ever heard him speak. As I thought about it, it began to make sense. After all, what do you say to people who routinely humiliate you for entertainment?

I patted myself on the back because I had never been guilty of rolling pennies, but I also knew I had never done anything to stop them either.

Earlier today I pulled up to an intersection and saw a man with a “will work for food” sign sitting beside the traffic light. The car in front of me was filled with teenagers. As they pulled up to the light they dumped out all of the empty fast food wrappers they had in their car and yelled “here you go” to the man with the sign. For a few seconds I was back in Jr. High, watching pennies roll across a gym floor.

Nathan, I’m sorry.