Penny For Your Thoughts

Along the banks of a mighty river stood two men from the Northeast. One of these men was Asa Lovejoy, and the handle of the other was Francis Pettygrove. Lovejoy was a gentleman hailing from the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and Pettygrove hailed from the township of Portland, Maine. Overtime, they had traveled across the vast North American continent, and found themselves in an area known as the Oregon Territory.

After a period of surveying the area, they decided to establish a land claim where the Willamette and Columbia Rivers merged. As fate would have it, luck would be on their side. New emigrants were coming in droves via the Oregon Trail to begin a new life in the area.

Aside from the wave of emigrants coming to Oregon, the two Easterners also felt the city they were building would be a great location for an inland port. With this in mind, they knew their city would probably fair well, so they began the difficult process of deciding what to name it. Lovejoy and Pettyrove met over dinner in nearby Oregon City, and eventually came to a compromise.

The name of the city would be decided by the flip of a coin. Who scored two-out-of-three would win. Pettygrove pulled a penny from his pocket, and the toss began. He won. Their small village would be called Portland, after the city in Maine which he was from (Portland, Maine was named after the ancestral Portland on the south coast of England).

I think this story has a poetic moral. Whatever situation life presents us with, we would like to think we have total control over that situation. But the story of the Portland coin toss, in my opinion, is a humble reminder that half of life is totally up to fate.

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I wrote this poem on a lazy afternoon at a picturesque coffee estate in Coorg. Don’t forget to give this some applause below and share if this adds a page to the book of your life!