Ketchup or Catsup?

 I'm chronicling a very odd moment from yesterday's Breakfast of Excellence, my routinely scheduled Friday morning breakfast with my friends at the TASTee Grill. At a certain point, after we'd finished our traditional meals (we actually never order, we just sit down at the waitress brings the same four selections) when Erik pulled out a penny and asked me to pass the ketchup. He wanted to determine the date, which I initially thought related to a discussion of the value of that particular vintage of currency, but I think he was then going to ask us what we thought the most important thing that had happened in that year. So, why the ketchup? Apparently, ketchup, because of its acidity, was/is good for cleaning coins (or at least pennies), and Erik assured us that he used this method all the time when he was growing up in Burlington. Kevin then assured that this was well known, and I had to admit that once again the Indiana education system had failed me. I decided to capture this moment in time because I thought it said something about lovely, odd, organic nature of long-term friendships. None of us thought that it was odd at that moment that Erik decided to clean an old penny with ketchup, and it immediately launched us into this meandering discussion of somewhat related subjects, including Sandy relating his father, a very successful attorney, and his decades-long quest for found coins and elaborate theories on the best places to find them (he didn't collect coins, rather, he just saved them in a special pile and used them to occasionally take his wife out to dinner; he took her out to eat at many times, but the coin-generated meals was an acknowledged special treat). I cannot do justice to how much I will miss these guys next year.

I didn't get to ask whether or not the cleaning required ketchup or catsup because, in the end, the penny was so damaged that the date could not be recovered. It was so light that it almost had the weight of a similar circle of cardboard, weird.