Every Saturday when I have time for a four-mile walk around the same square mile in Tempe, I find money. Maybe only a few pennies, but sometimes more. I attribute my luck mostly to a keen and ever-searching eye that has served me well in more than 40 years of looking for things to write about.Its a bit confounding as to why pennies, dimes and quarters commonly are lying in the street, along the curb. Typically, I find the coins on the same streets and often in the same blocks. Now the pennies, especially, display plenty of abuse from being ground by car and truck tires. Some are literally doubled over. When I turn them into the bank, I put them together and declare them money too damaged for recirculation. I push the better pennies into 50-cent paper rolls.Im not too good to bend down and pick up a penny. Today, I found one on the floor by a copying machine as I was publishing my Kiwanis Clubs weekly newsletter. Later, I found a dime in a parking lot. (I pick up washers, bolts, nuts and other reusable items, as well, and put them in the storage cases in my home workroom for reuse.) I am amazed at how many small components fall off vehicles routinely — springs, rubber connectors, thingamajigs. I have found charge cards and even a drivers license and have taken the trouble to get them returned. I pick up smashed aluminum cans and recycle them for cash, as well. I have often wondered about city street sweepers who cover miles and miles of public streets, swishing dirt, leaves, trash and all sorts of fragments of civilization into their bins. Do they have a way of sifting out valuables, especially coins? Or does it all just go to the landfill for archeologists 2,000 years hence to find? I suspect no public works director would find it worth an employees time to sort out coins and pocket the change. Now, back to why money lies so commonly in the gutters of street. Do drivers and passengers discard loose change out their windows as they travel down the street? Is there some kind of a coin flip exercise that I dont know about? Are they casting away dribbles of their fortune to the world on the belief that some poor pedestrian could gain from their profligate ways? Is it some plan in the cosmos for me to have more pocket change?Whenever I find a coin, I scan the broader area and often find more coins always making sure the traffic is clear before I bend over to grab it. How is it that a batch of coins suddenly is loosened onto the landscape?Of course, theres no getting rich from bending to lift a penny out of the dust. But I can never disregard it. It still has worth when combined with other pennies and gains critical mass. And maybe a coin found will be a wheat penny. Its good exercise alone to bend over and stretch to save a penny from oblivion.Maybe in the grand scheme of things, money lying at our feet was put there for us to discover and acknowledge its worth and reclaim to spend for something of worth.Still, Im perplexed at how and why the coins are cast into the gutter in the first place. Perhaps, I dont understand what may be the motivation, except a feeling that certain amounts of money dont matter, dont count, to some folks. Maybe there is power in casting money to the wind, lest it burls or burns of hole in ones pocket.There’s something to be said about staying ahead of the street sweeper.

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