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I often sleep in on Saturdays, though this Saturday I would have liked to have been up by 6 a.m. -- I wanted to have an early cup of coffee before attending the memorial for Rockin' Rob, scheduled for 8 a.m. Saturday morning at the Go Green bottle depot.

Didn't make it -- didn't get up until the early afternoon. I skipped stopping for coffee and got right to binning. In less than an hour I was rounding a corner into what was my fourth lane of the afternoon, and, at the rate thing were going, possibly my last before cashing in. Right at the first building beside the dumpster, a fat black garbage bag of bottles. The first three blocks of that lane were blockbuster binning. Two more blocks remained before I would basically be done and on my way to the bottle depot.

Enter the car binner

As I crossed the intersection into the fourth block, I could see a man standing in the lane. He stooped to pick up a plastic drink container. The way he was dressed, I thought he was a trades-person. He was standing there holding the bottle, looking right at me as I rode towards him. A car was coming up the lane towards the both of us. I moved to the right to make some room. The car slowed to a stop so the front end was between the fellow with the bottle and me. It was a ratty four-door. The driver had glasses like musicians wore in the 1960s -- narrow, rectangular lenses. The driver was ratty too. The back seat was full of bottles; bagged, boxed, and loose. A car binner!

The fellow standing on the other side of the car's front end caught my eye and flipped me the bottle, which I caught. I also caught how the driver's eye greedily followed the path of the bottle as it arced over the hood of his car and into my hand. The driver's eyes snapped back to the other fellow, who got into the front passenger side, and the two of them -- a pair of car binners -- drove into the next block of the lane I had just come from -- could've knocked me over with a feather!

I thought the driver looked an awful lot like a binner I hadn't seen for over two years at least, but, well, it didn't matter. I recognized the look in his eyes as he tracked that five cent bottle. It was a surreal moment, the sort you remember. I know once I ranted about a crow doing me out of a nickel, but this was different; to see the look of actual greed for a nickel that was getting away. Definitely worth getting up for.