(Photo - Tallahassee skyline.)
Fast approaching the end of my seventh decade, I muse about
the last ten years of retirement. This morning it occurred to me: freed of a
work life, a mothering life, a cycle of work-cook-sleep-shop-clean-organize, I’m
not in a hurry anymore. Where once I ran errands at breakneck speed, impatient
in traffic, choosing the drive-through every time instead of parking and
walking in, now I drive the speed limit. I talk to people. I park at some
distance from the front door of Publix just to make myself walk, and I return
my shopping cart to the store every time. (Well, almost every time. If it’s
raining I leave it in the cart corral.)
SO – here’s something I think I want to do. I want to
memorialize what I’m going to call “Chats with Strangers.” I confess, I’ve
never felt much interest in the stories of folks I don’t know – or maybe I just
haven’t had the time to listen. But for the last ten years I have had many
brief, one-time encounters with the folks who live around here, and I think I’ve
realized that these little conversations have unlocked some pretty rigid
preconceptions and made me a better, kinder person.
This one will be my story of “Standing in Line at the Bank.”
This morning I decided to take some rolls of coins to the
bank and convert them to bills. I do this every so often, as soon as I
accumulate around $40 in rolled coins. More than $40 worth begins to get pretty
heavy, and I’ve had at least one occasion where I dropped a roll of quarters
and the paper wrapper split open and quarters went everywhere. I lost some of
them – that upset me far more than it should have. So now I’m more careful. But
I digress.
Behind me in the short line was a very large man, both tall
and broad. He had a belly, for sure. He was dressed in cargo shorts and heavy
work boots with socks, the tops of which poked out of the boots. He was very
tanned, almost to the point of looking like he was covered in dirt. His hair
was long and wavy and tousled, and I figured maybe he had combed it when he got
up this morning, and maybe not. He
smelled like sweat and smoke.
I have to mention in a little sidebar that I am awful about
snap judgments based on appearances. You would think I would have learned at my
advanced age to suspend that, but, sadly, no. So my instant thought was, “A
bum. Wonder what he’s doing in the bank.”
He said, “I save $20 in quarters every day. I roll them up
just like that,” pointing at the rolls in the little basket I carried the coins
in to make sure I didn’t have one of those roll-dropping disasters in the
parking lot. “I do that and in December
I take my kids on a nice vacation.”
Trying to do the quick math in my head and
coming up with $140 a week for 52 weeks but not getting any farther than that, I
replied, “That’s really cool. Coins can add up.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I used to use them to buy Lotto tickets
and – well, I don’t know what I used my change for, actually. It just kind of
disappeared. So I decided to save them instead.”
At this point, I’m not sure whether to believe him because
that’s a lot of quarters to have every single day, but I don’t care. We are
having this conversation, and I’m hooked.
“I just try to bring them in every so often,” I said. “My
husband and I just dump our change on the dresser and we have a little change
counter thing that separates them into quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies,
and after a while, there’s some real money there.”
He nodded. “In December last year I took them to New York,”
he said. “And we went over into New Jersey, stayed at nice hotels, had a really
nice trip. And it didn’t cost me much extra money because I’d been saving those
quarters all year.”
He gazed out the window of the bank. “Now if I could just
quit smoking,” he said. “That would be some real money.”
Aha, I thought. A smoker. Figures. (Remember my bad habit of
jumping to conclusions.) “Yeah,“ I said. “That would be almost like a raise in
pay.” (Thinking to myself, wonder if he has a regular job.)
At that point, both tellers beckoned and we each walked up
to a window. “It’s gonna rain today,” he said to the teller.
“Well, Paul, if you say so, I believe it,” she responded.
Hm, thought I. She knows him. Regular customer?
“How do you want this?” she asked.
“Whatever,” he said. And as she counted out the bills, I’m
figuring he’s just cashed a check.
“You know,” she said, “if you want to know about the
weather, ask a yard man.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of want it to rain and I kind of
don’t. I’m so backed up.”
Okay, I think, he has a lawn service. Hm.
Paul (now I know his name) told the tellers to have a nice
day, and left.
I cashed in my rolls of coins, got some more penny wrappers
from the teller, and turned to leave. “We had a half inch of rain at our house
last night,” I said.
Paul’s teller sighed. “Jealous,” she said. “We had hardly
any.”
My teller said, “We didn’t have any at all.”
“My yard is much happier today,” I said. They both smiled. “Y’all
have a nice weekend, now.”
“And you do the same,” they said, almost in chorus.
As I backed my car out to leave the parking lot, I stopped
to let the driver ahead of me pull out. It was Paul. He was driving a giant
pickup truck with a magnetic sign on the door, and pulling a large trailer
loaded with landscaping equipment. The trailer had a sign, too. I couldn’t
quite make it out, but the whole rig was pretty impressive. “You are an idiot”
I said to myself. And I wondered where Paul and the kids are going this year.
And I hoped he could beat that smoking habit; that would mean a few more
dollars for that vacation.
