Good morning Hank, it's Thursday. It's my last video of Pizzamas. So the background to this story
is that the couple months before my book, Turtles All the Way Down, came out was a pretty difficult time in my life.
I was just completely
overwhelmed with worry about what people would think about the book, and whether I could handle the tour and publicity
stuff, and also, like, how I was gonna talk about my own mental illness in the context of the book.
I was also really excited to have a book to share, of course, but I—to be honest
I was really really scared. Okay, so tuatara play a role in my new book,
and this is the New Zealand five-cent piece,
which I believe to be the only coin ever minted featuring a tuatara. This one's from 1972,
but New Zealand minted these five-cent pieces up until
2006, when they stopped because, you know, it was the rational thing to do. Because, you know, money exists to facilitate the exchange of goods
and services, which five-cent coins don't do very effectively.
Also, it costs more than five cents per coin to mint five-cent coins, making their existence especially astonishing,
but what if I told you that some countries still mint coins worth one-fifth of one nickel?
Now I'm on a tangent. Point being New Zealand stopped making these things over a decade ago. Okay, so one night
I found myself on eBay trying to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things, which I presume is
what drives 90% of eBay's traffic,
and I thought "I wonder if I could buy some New Zealand five-cent coins." Turns out I could! I was able to buy
23 of them, for a total of 22 US dollars.
And then I started thinking if I could get a couple hundred of these New Zealand five-cent pieces
I could give them as gifts to everybody who leaves a gift for us on our tour.
But eBay didn't have nearly enough of them, so I reached out to some Kiwi nerdfighters and lots of people responded,
but in the end the project was spearheaded by a
librarian and teacher named Megan. Megan wrote a letter to her local newspaper asking people if they had any five-cent coins lying around because
there was this American author who could use them. The letter was printed online and then eventually in the newspaper and people
responded to it. Like, a lot of people. Most of the people who sent coins to Megan had no idea who I was, but
they sent them in anyway. They came in three at a time, or a hundred at a time. There were letters about how people's
mothers had collected these coins, or about how they were excited for their coins to go on an adventure.
I got letters in Maori talking about the importance of tuatara.
And I just want to pause to note the amount of effort involved in this. Like, first people had to read a letter in the
paper, then they had to, like, go find their coins, and then they had to pay at least a dollar in postage to mail
them to Megan, or else go to the trouble of dropping them off at the school where Megan works—all for a stranger in America.
And they did this for no reason except to be kind. They had no idea
I was going through a difficult time in my life,
and they had no way of knowing how much their generosity would mean to me—that I would dissolve into tears of gratitude when
thousands and thousands of tuatara coins arrived in the mail from Megan.
We gave many out on tour,
but I still have some, and I will try to use them well, to give them out over the course of my life to those
who might need a physical
reminder of how kind people can be. And how just as cruelty and mistrust can spread,
so can kindness. To the Kiwis who made this happen, if you're watching, thank you.
I know that you will say it was just a little thing, but little things matter.
Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.