waiter, there's a coin in my soup

There is nothing like an impending crisis to trigger ingenuity.

We start doing things that we would never have dreamed of doing under other circumstances. Some of them quite creative. Others are just a bit creepy.

No one knows if the coronavirus has made its way to the little villages by the sea where I live. If it did not travel here with our recent Feast of San Patricio crowds, I would be surprised. The local officials' approach to the coronavirus seems to share my idea of medical care: if you do not go to the doctor, you will always be in perfect health.

That does not keep us from adopting the same attitude as Russian peasants waiting for the inevitable invasion of Batu Khan at the head of his Mongol army. Because we do not know what may or may not work, we try a bit of everything.

Every graybeard (as Solzhenitsyn would put it) knows that currency is the preferred public bus service of pathogens. The internet is filled with urban lore that the microbes dancing on top of a 10-peso coin are more numerous than a French kiss from a TB patient.

In this case, the urban lore has the advantage of actually being true. We did not need the coronavirus to tell us that.

So, what to do with those coins in our pocket? We never give them a second thought that we might catch the flu, a cold, or a rather nasty case of explosive diarrhea from them. But the coronavirus has centered our attention on any chink in the cordon sanitaire we have tried to build around our lives.

Facebook is filled with posts of people who have implemented a rather simple method to feel better about their cocoon. If coins come into the clean room that is now your house, just dump them in a bowl of heavily-bleached water, and let them soak.

I tried it last night. I had about twenty coins in my pocket. That was unusual because I do not care for coins. They wear holes in my pockets in about the same way dogs seek freedom by digging holes under fences. If offered coins at a store, I almost always leave them behind.

But I did have some coins in an intact pocket. I chose a small bowl, filled it half-way with water, added a bit of Clorox, and dumped the coins in the solution for their private spa treatment while I watched The Darkest Hour. By the time Churchill had successfully manipulated his way through the pessimistic wiles of his colleagues, I took a look at what I had wrought in my bleach bowl.

The coins looked as if they had just rolled out of the mint. When I looked at the liquid in the bowl, I saw why.

That is a photograph of the bowl at the top of this essay. On first sight, it looks like a bowl of indifferent miso soup.

Soup it is. But that is not miso. It is the non-paying passengers on the coins I was carrying around in my pocket.

None of this should surprise me. In my youth, I was a coin collector. One of the first thing a collector does when digging through piles of coins for a potential prey is to clean them. I am accustomed to the detritus of daily living that attaches itself to coins. But the broth in last night's bowl was a perfect reminder of just how much gunk can attach itself to the daily items in our lives.

Coin-soaking is never going to be the nuclear weapon of the coronavirus age. But it is one of those distractions that makes us feel as if we are doing something for The Effort -- like Victory Gardens and scrap drives during the Second World War.

Of course, once this wave passes, all of this coin lore will be as interesting as last week's miso.