DEVELOPING RESPECT FOR MONEY MAKES GOOD SENSE.

Byline: Jane Birnbaum

GRAY-HAIRED, they looked like a prosperous but modest older couple strolling along and when she dropped some change, I looked to see what she'd do. I always get a kick out of watching kids eye dropped coins with great disdain and move on. I expect older folks, maybe old enough to have been young during the Depression, to pick 'em up.

But to my surprise, this woman acted like one of the kids. She surveyed the coins, a dime and a penny lying side by side, and pocketed only the dime. After they moved on, I chuckled and nabbed the humble penny.

Maybe I'm just a prisoner to a rhyme my grandmother taught me when I was a sprout: ``Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck.'' Sometimes I bend to pick up a penny that some jokester has glued to the sidewalk.

But that's OK, because I believe the universe acknowledges and rewards my concern for the poor penny. Once I found $13 in the street - first three ones and a few steps later, a miraculous $10. Then another time I found a diamond earring on the ground next to the washing machine in my building - not exactly the street but near enough. (Yes, I posted a ``found'' sign.)

I remember obsessively those noisy change counters banks used to have when I was a kid. You'd bring in your bags of change, pennies included, and the change machine counted them and deposited the sum in your account. Today the tellers hand you those darn rolls, knowing the chances of your using them are slim to none.

And now, there's these new machines in grocery stores that count your change for you, deduct a price for the ``service'' and give you scrip to use in the store. Now that's utterly shameless capitalization on widespread disdain for the penny. One rainy day this winter, with an old movie on TV, I'll roll all my pennies, I promise.

Maybe I'm just superstitious about money because I feel as if I've never been very good at making it, and I figure if I'm good to money, it'll be good to me when I'm old and defenseless. Maybe I fear penny abuse will haunt me at some later date. But still, there's something serious going on here, too. In honoring pennies, the humblest and least important of coins, I express my respect for all money.

It's disrespect of money that characterizes the recent massive bail-out of a major hedge fund. The calls for new federal regulation of hedge funds miss the point. Hedge funds are already sufficiently regulated - as an individual, you can't invest in them unless you're bucks-up and highly sophisticated. Banks and brokerage firms are presumed even more knowledgeable.

But Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin have been warning for months that banks and brokerage firms that invested their shareholders' money in hedge funds, the same ones that rushed to bail out long-term capital, were becoming much too careless about the risk they were taking.

Perhaps their principals could learn some respect for money, and their shareholders, by picking up pennies.