A decade ago, when our kid was eight years old, she was browsing with spouse & Grandma at a Goodwill. They found a box with a very pretty but very old kimono in it and she tried it on. When she put her hands in the pockets, she pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. Spouse practically had to clap both hands over her mouth and hustle her out of there to the parking lot.
A couple months later the money burned a hole in her pocket and she spent most of it on Yu-Gi-Oh! game cards. It was a most valuable fiscal lesson. I think she's still holding the cards somewhere, waiting for them to be worth what she paid for them.
I'll pick up any penny I see lying on the ground. Sometimes when I find two or three I start looking around for the hidden snare that Wile E. Coyote sets in RoadRunner cartoons.
Over [-]20[/-]25 years ago spouse used to be stationed at Lajes Field in the Azores. Every morning the military's anti-submarine warfare planes would take off to hunt the Soviet submarines transiting between the Med and the G-I-UK gap, and if they were hot they'd fly round the clock. One of the routines you religiously carry out around military airfields is the FOD
(foreign object damage) walkdown to remove any runway debris. It was a very small Navy command in those days, so everyone turned out for the morning FOD walkdown in a line abreast from one end of the runway to the other. The weather was usually miserable, but it was social and the good news was that you usually got to keep what you picked up.
She did this routine almost daily for over a year, and even today she can still spot a stray coin (or a coin-shaped object) at 10 yards.
We both pick up a couple dollars worth of "Hawaiian" nickels each month. Thats a soda can or bottle since we have the "HI FIVE" here (5 cents a can/bottle for "disposable" drink containers.) Full disclosure: You pay $.06 but only get back $.05. DW says if I don't stop drinking diet sodas, we'll go broke on the deal. I tell her we could make our fortune dumpster diving for HI nickels. She ain't buying it.
We've finally matured to the point where we no longer pull over to the side of the road and scamper back to pick up the stray cans/bottles. Almost never.
However every morning that I'm surfing White Plains I'll see an old, old man (in his early 80s?) park his pickup, pull out a trash bag, and start going through the mahalo cans and the dumpsters. His truck bed will have a dozen or so full bags in it. I'd like to think that he's getting his morning walk, not that it's his retirement income...
