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Befuddled by Baht
Sherlock Holsemn’ the Coin
It’s a baht coin (฿) from Thailand.
Sherlock Holmes could, no doubt, have told you that in less than a minute. It took my husband, who spent the off hours of his childhood collecting coins, about a half an hour to find the coin’s primary origin.
But how did it make it way, way down the far reaches of our driveway? More precisely how did it turn up just in front of our back gate?
It’s extreme cleanliness told us that it hadn’t lain there long.
Besides, my husband is a geologist who spends much of his life looking for anomalies under foot. He was absolutely sure that it hadn’t been been there the day before.
Who do we know that’s been to Thailand? Nobody. There are several different different neighborhoods with asian flavors in our area, but as far as I know there haven't been a lot of people immigrating from Thailand. A few restaurants in the area are the extent of our connection. We have some vague sense of a faraway exotic locale full of elephants, orchids, shrines and curry. Sherlock Holmes would have pointed out, however, that the photo of Bangkok on the web, doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room for large mammals.
Sherlock would have considered the possibility that it resulted from automatation. Our garbage, recycling and compost bins live near the gate. Did the great arms of the Recycling Works truck pick up the coin at somebody else house and deposit it on the lid of one of our bins? Then perhaps it flipped off when we banged the lid? You'd think dimes, quarters and pennies would be raining down if it worked like that.
Holmes might decide that someone came looking for us at our back gate, stood there uncertainly for a few minutes fingering the coins in her pocket, and then changed her mind. He’d know it was a woman, of course, because of something to do with the distance between gate and door. Don’t ask me to explain that.
Personally I think the baht coin is a sign. A sign that it’s my turn to do elephant duty.
฿
