Get Out and Do Some Walking--You’ll Never Need to Buy Paper Clips Again

Afew years ago I gave up my car and became a walker. Some of the benefits were predictable: fewer bills, less flab around the waist, lower blood pressure and sounder sleep. (Those suspicious sounds from the parking lot could no longer have anything to do with me.) Another was unexpected: I find things.

As a child in the 1930s, I used to patrol the gutters of my neighborhood in Albany, N.Y., in search of cigar bands to paste in my album. Once in a while, in addition to the anticipated Cremo and Tudor and White Owl and Dutch Masters bands, I would be surprised by a coin. Even at a time when the design of cars allowed dignified entry and exit, people tended to drop things near cars.

Now I find myself enjoying the same kind of fortuitous discoveries in my routine walks around Chula Vista. As might be expected, the parking lots I cut through yield a good many bits of loot, for the same reason the gutters of Albany did. Lots of things come out of pockets along with car keys, and I think they often fall unnoticed by people whose hearing isn’t what it used to be. Anyway, there lies a nickel, a quarter, a nail clipper, a pen, a cigarette lighter and, occasionally, a crumpled dollar bill.

Once I found a dime while traversing the parking lot of the Masonic building on 3rd Avenue. I went by there again a day or two later and picked up two dimes in almost the same spot. It was a relief to find nothing the next time. Otherwise I might have been led into profitless speculation about the supernatural.

Sometimes I go weeks without coming across anything worth bending to pick up. (I no longer stoop for the pennies I would have grabbed back in the days when one would buy two Mary Janes or a slab of gum and a baseball card.) But eventually I make a find and experience the old pleasure.

My walks help keep down expenditures for office supplies. I pick up unmangled paper clips and pencils with a few inches of use left. And then there are the frequent gifts from litterbug letter carriers: stout rubber bands that secure their packets of mail and are discarded along their routes.

Need any hardware? Go for a walk. Nuts, bolts and washers often appear in my path. Disintegrating rattletraps shed bits of ironmongery in the street to be retrieved by jaywalkers like me. (You kick them ahead to the gutter and pick them up in safety.) And a stroll past any construction site is likely to weigh down my pants with dropped nails. I haven’t bought one in years.

Sometimes I have misgivings about pocketing a balled-up dollar bill found on the sidewalk. Was it dropped by some child trotting to 7-Eleven for a quart of milk? I try not to think of the possible tears and recriminations.

From time to time, I make my way to Balboa Park for a morning walk with a companion. Our rambles in the vicinity of the golf course have predictably turned up an occasional errant Titleist or Top-Flite ball, and once we happened upon a wallet full of a Navy petty officer’s identification and personal papers--but no money--which we turned in at police headquarters.

Our most interesting find in the park was a briefcase in the bushes bordering Park Boulevard. It contained cosmetics and also passports and other documents of a Guadalajara family. I assume it had been stolen from a parked car and then discarded, less any money or other valuables that might have been inside. We dropped it off at the Mexican Consulate with the hope it would get back to the unfortunate tourists.

Finds in Chula Vista have not been limited to the piddling items described earlier. I hit my monetary jackpot while taking a shortcut through an empty service station, where I was halted by the unmistakable shade of federal green on the ground among the oil stains. It unfolded to a $20 bill.

Then there were the rings. While approaching Cornell’s stationery store one sunny day, I spotted a sparkling object in the entrance to the parking lot. It was a diamond ring. The stone, though tiny, was genuine. Inquiries at the store and an ad in the local paper failed to turn up the loser, so the ring was subsequently turned into $100 worth of groceries.

A second ring, a child-size gold one with a leafy motif, was discovered in a guitar near the Mitsubishi Bank. Inquiries and an ad failed once more. I still have the ring and am waiting for the price of gold to go up to $800 again.

One puzzle: With fragile gold chains around the necks of so many active youngsters these days, why have I never found one? Maybe tomorrow.