"And good luck to you"

We drink too many carbonated drinks in our house (it's called "soda" here in New England and "pop" where I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, see this nice map for a further breakdown). Because we drink so much soda pop (I'm willing to compromise), we collect a lot of cans and bottles. Here in Massachusetts, you pay a 5 cent deposit on each can and bottle that you can get back if you recycle them. This week-end, it was time to return the bottles and cans because the shed was filling up with bags of them and it was getting hard to get to my scooter!

I wrestled the seven bags of cans into the van and when I got to the store where the recycling machines were, I knew I'd never be able to carry them all to the store from the car in one load so I got a shopping cart and piled them in. It made quite a stack and it was still hard to move them as I needed to balance them while pushing the cart and keeping an eye out the drivers who didn't seem to notice this mountain of plastic and aluminum moving through the parking lot. As I was pushing them along, I passed an old guy (even older than me) sitting in a chair in front of the store with a can for donations. He was wearing a brightly colored vest identifying him as a member of the Knights of Columbus and that he was collecting for the "Protecting God's Children" program. Now I'm not one to care much about my appearance (my wife is a saint for marrying me) and I often go out in dirty clothes with my hair in a mess and my beard untrimmed. But this guy wasn't in any better shape than I was. He didn't seem to fit in the chair and he appeared to be in pretty poor health. But he was doing a good deed and I respected him for it. I planned on making a donation once I was finished returning all the bottles and cans. But as I walked by him, he said, "And good luck to you." I think he thought I was a homeless man with this shopping cart full of bottles and cans that had been collected by the road. It made me a little ashamed that I looked bad enough to bring that reaction. But I also liked him more because for as bad as he looked, he took the time to encourage someone he thought was in worse shape than himself

No matter how bad our state, there is always someone worse off than we are. There is always someone we can try to encourage. I was determined to quickly finish up the returns, get into the store to get the deposit money back and come back out to make a donation to his cause. But you have to return the containers one at a time by pushing them into the machine and waiting while it decides that you're not trying to cheat. It took me over a half an hour and by the time I was done, my friend had left. I'll keep an eye out for him and next time, I won't wait to make a donation.