Hi Darleen - I have a good friend at work, he loves metal of all kinds, brass, copper, aluminum, stainless, ... silver and gold, and will not suffer a scrap to be thrown away. Occassionally I'll bring him a stainless steel piston or a thick aluminum shield that was on its way to the dumpster. As I set the piece beside his workbench, he'll look up from a circuit board he is fixing. After a quick, blurry glance at me, his eyes will refocus upon the metal, and narrowing, he will set upon it with a deep approving, aaahhhh... All goes home with him, gets melted down, and rebuilt. He'll often heft a piece appraisingly, look at me inquisitively and ask, "Do you now how much this stuff costs"? I got scolded once for throwing away several brass jackscrews. "Hey, that's good stuff, that doesn't get thrown away", he instructs, shoving under my nose a box with 10 lbs of stripped jackscrews in it.
Often over a cup of coffee we've chewed over the news of the day, politics, money, debt, Berlin, Iraq, Japan, Jerusalem, gruffly sharing some dark humor over the continuing story of mankind, the pursuit and exercise of power, and the folly that goes along with it. As we pick ourselves up to return to work, he has often in the past years with a grim smile and a gleam in his eye fixed me with a very hard look, tilting back his head and saying slowly and somewhat slyly, "Yup. We live in interesting times"! Yes, you could say that the world is in a tangle. Always has been, I suppose, only now we get to see so much more of it, and the knots seem to be tied and loosed sometimes within the same day. Strange..
My friend has an inborn belief in the value of hard assets, he believes strongly in the power of steel. One of the basic standards that he upholds is the ownership of a certain minimum level of scrap silver coin for each family member, which he buys by the pound. If I tell him that gold is down $2 today, he unfailingly grunts, "good". To him it means that the economy is still ticking along nicely, times are good, and also that he will soon buy more gold. If I tell him that gold has gone up, his response will be, "Oh, too bad". To him that means that the dollar is weakening, times may get hard, and also that gold will cost more. I have seen this same man nurse a baby birdlet to maturity after his cat made a meal of its mother. I think he is probably the sanest person I know.
Tom |
