I still can’t find new coins in change

A 2017-D nickel is in my pocket.

It is the only thing I have to show for looking at my change over the weekend.

I was traveling for Memorial Day.

That is not unusual. Many Americans were.

I had hoped that that I might receive some coins of the current year.

Each shiny coppery cent I received I eagerly checked.

No mintmarked Philadelphia cent of 2017 came my way.

I did not even receive one from Denver.

I have been looking for the new cent since January.

That is when it became known that the Mint was putting a “P” mintmark on the 2017 Philadelphia cent.

It was done to mark the 225th anniversary of the founding of the Mother Mint.

The most interesting coin I found was one that caused me to think about my past.

It was a 1965 cent.

As common as it is, it did not seem common at the time I was looking to fill my Whitman cent album.

Then it was more likely that I would encounter a 1964-D cent, or a 1964 plain.

I looked up the mintages to refresh my memory.

The 1964-D has a mintage well over double that of the 1965.

It is 3.8 billion pieces.

The 1964 mintage is 2.7 billion pieces.

The 1965 comes in at 1.5 billion cents.

That 1965 output number is the combined total of Denver and Philadelphia.

No mintmarks were put on coins dated 1965, 1966 or 1967.

No wonder it seemed relatively hard to find a 1965 among all the 1964-dated change.

When I spotted the 1965 cent over the weekend, I felt a twinge of nostalgia.

I had come up with absolutely nothing dated 2017 for all my efforts.

Wait a minute.

I wrote that I have a 2017-D nickel in my pocket.

I do.

At my mother’s, she happened to mention that she had received some junk mail with a nickel in it.

She handed it to me.

It has the new date.

Does that count as a find?

Buzz blogger Dave Harper has twice won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."

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