by Pa Rock
Roadside Walker
While Donald Trump is a "con man" and of absolutely no use to society - other than to serve as a bad example - I, myself, am a "can man" and at least serve as a minor benefit to those in the world around me. What a difference a vowel makes!
Most summers I have been a community nuisance fixture walking along the local roadways and picking up aluminum cans. For a couple of summers there was a young adult male who also patrolled the area in search of aluminum. He did his rounds of a bicycle, and we sort of informally divided the routes, but he quit his effort about the time the plague set in, and I did as well. I didn't do much the past two summers - 2020 and 2021 - opting instead to stay closer to the house and get my 10,000 steps-a-day in walking about my yard - which is smaller than Rhode Island, though not by much.
On my rare trips to town I noticed that the ditches were starting to fill with all manner of trash, and that the aluminum can situation was ripe for some attention. So over the past two days I have once again begun walking between the roadways and ditches picking up cans - and they are plentiful! Yesterday I did such a good job of picking up and crushing cans with my tired old feet - and walking more than 3,300 steps in the process - that this morning one of my nice neighbors left a beer can in my driveway as a reward for my efforts!
I have been collecting aluminum ever since moving here in March of 2014, and I now have several big bags of crushed cans taking up space out in the barn. I need to figure out how to tell when the price is right for selling, and then get rid of them. I have a few places left to visit on my bucket list (Nantucket, Bermuda, Greece, Morocco, and anyplace in the Southern Hemisphere), and the can money would certainly help with travel expenses.
But for the time being I will just keep walking, picking up cans, and adding to my stash - and I wave at the neighbors as they whiz by tut-tutting about that poor old geezer who used to be a local school teacher but now has been reduced to picking up cans for a living. They warn they children never to wind up like me - as they race on over to Walmart with the Trump stickers on their bumpers smirking back in self-righteous disapproval.
They collect their trash, and I collect mine.
2 comments:
Was the beer can which the neighbor left in your driveway full of beer or empty?
Empty. And it turns out that it was actually a "margarita" can. Who knew you could actually buy a margarita in a can???
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