No Deposit, No Return

Most mornings, at dawn, I walk. I like being present when dawn dawns. In my zanier moments, I imagine myself the monitor of dawning, tasked with inspecting the process, making sure it all goes well. And most mornings I encounter the “can man.” We exchange a brief greeting, and he passes on. But I watch him. He is not monitoring the dawn.

The “can man” is astride a Mercier Orion AL road bike, from which hang a half dozen white plastic bags that he fills with empty soda cans and bottles. He is spandexed in light-colored shorts and wears a sleek, tailed helmet. He is aerodynamic. He visits dumpsters, scours the streets and yards, and even peeks into the garbage receptacles of well-known soda swillers. He’s been out far longer than I, judging by the contents of the bags. Shortly, they will be bulging with empties, and he will head home to await the opening of the local Hy-Vee grocery store where he will redeem them for a nickel apiece. Iowa is not a blue state or a red state; it is a deposit-and-return state.

The “can man” causes me to experience cognitive dissonance. Scrounging for soda empties seems venal, somehow, and sordidly moneygrubbing. A genuflection before Philistinism. It “don’t seem natural,” as Huck would say, certainly nothing a grown man should be doing. Surely he must think so, too; otherwise, why would he be out before dawn breaks, safe from public observation? But, then again, perhaps he is a man pledging allegiance to acquisition, that most American of pastimes. Perhaps he is a smart man, seizing an opportunity. Perhaps he is a man drawn by the prose of the world rather than its poetry. Perhaps he is a serious cyclist, and the money he makes redeeming cans and bottles has enabled him to pursue his passion, to purchase the bike, the clothes, the helmet. Perhaps this is part of his training for a race. Perhaps his family needs the supplemental income. Perhaps he is an environmental activist or an exercise enthusiast who has found a clever way to monetize his commitments. Perhaps he is a performance artist of sorts, enacting a comedic search to comment on human finitude, the cramped coordinates of human spirit in the world. Perhaps he wants only the symmetry of closing the circuit of deposit-return-redemption that others have left incomplete. Who knows?

But I do know this. Each of us comes into the world with a deposit. We are given minds with which to reason, contemplate, and imagine. We are given hearts with chambers and valves and aortas to fill with and pump out love, compassion, and courage. We are given tongues to speak truth and ears to hear it. We are given hands with which to work and play and hold other hands. We are given feet to hasten to the assistance of others. We are given souls to see a beckoning beyondness that summons us to faith and hope and to being what it is in us to become. Our task, and it is a most difficult one, is to make a return on that deposit. If we don’t, there is no redemption.