The Sad Old Man
Welcome back!
My wife and I were on our way to our second night job last night and saw a sight that really upset us.
As we stopped to get gas on a fairly busy highway, we saw a slow moving old man walking his bike along the highway. After we stopped and filled up we saw him approach the gas station, park his bike and proceed to go through all the garbage cans, looking for aluminum cans.
While the sight was rather sad, there is a lesson to be learned. This man was very old and probably grew up in a generation that was used to austerity. It’s sad that an old man has to dig through garbage to eat but this blog is not about social inequality.
What’s remarkable is that this man has nothing and instead of sitting around, letting his world collapse around him, he’s doing what he was raised to do. Earn money any way he could. Most people would not be willing to do what he was doing, they’d rather starve.
I think the man was very brave.
Besides, with commodity prices the way they are, those aluminum cans are actually worth the trouble. Think twice before tossing them out. Heck, don’t even pay someone to take them away from your curb on recycling day.
Take them to a recycler yourself and you’ll get some cash. You can also do what my wife and I have been known to do, gather cans up over many months and then drive up to Michigan to go eat out at Redamak’s. We don’t go to Michigan to cash the cans, we go to eat and use the cans to help pay for it.
