(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.