So Rite and yet so wrong

I had just turned the corner on my street this morning when I spotted a six-pack of soda sitting just past the end of someone’s driveway. It had obviously been deposited there inadvertently and the owner, whomever he or she was, had yet to discover it missing.

Before I continue, let me give you a little peek into my childhood. I’ve mentioned before that my parents are rather frugal. My dad saves money by being a bit stingy. He doesn’t swim in his coin like Scrooge McDuck, but he knows what he likes and he doesn’t like frivolous spending. As he’s gotten older, some of the things that were a constant in his life have fallen by the wayside. Like Christmas lights. He hasn’t put up Christmas lights in years because of the spike in his winter electric bill, which come to think of it, is probably not such a bad idea in these energy conscious times.

My mother, one the other hand, saves money by spending money. Just recently she bought a gallon of Ken’s Steak House Cesar dressing, not because she needed a gallon of Cesar dressing, but because she bought it for a song at some wholesale place and couldn’t pass up the deal. Only later did she realize the thing was more cumbersome than it was worth and tried to pawn it off off on us. Unlike my mother, I can say no to some freebies and also turned down the two jars of peanut butter she was going to send home with us because she had several and no one in their house eats much of the stuff.

That being said, I can recall several occasions during which I was in the car with my mother and she would order me out to retrieve a pop bottle or can that had been discarded on the side of the road. We don’t see much of that here in Michigan because we have a bottle deposit, but once in awhile we’d come across the random gem at a stop light or some residential side street and Mom would get excited. “Oh, Heather! There’s ten cents! Go get it!” When I was young, I’d oblige and unstrap my seatbelt to snag the can before the light turned green. As I got older, I’d just roll my eyes and say, “It’s just a dime, Mom. Get a grip.”

But there I was this morning, faced with an entire six pack of bottles completely filled with soda. Free pop and sixty cents of deposit money to boot. At first I drove past, figuring the soda probably belonged to the owner of the house behind where the six-pack was sitting. A ripped grocery bag could have deposited it there or maybe..maybe even an angry passenger had thrown it out a car window. If you don’t think someone could do that, I’ll have to some day tell the story of how Nathan defiantly threw one of his shoes out the window of a moving car because I was giving him the silent treatment.

All sorts of scenarios on how the soda wound up in the road were going through my head as I put the car in reverse and traveled back where the six-pack was chilling in the snow. As I got out of the car and approached, I could see it was Diet Rite soda. Diet Rite! How serendipitous. I love Diet Rite. It could have been regular Pepsi or Coke or, God forbid, root beer. But no. It was Diet Rite and I was the one rescuing it from possible annihilation at the hands of someone else’s snow tires by tossing it in the front seat of my car.

If I was a completely solid citizen, I could have just walked up to the house and placed the abandoned soda on the front porch. But I didn’t, and now I’m faced with a very Earl Hickey-like conundrum; was Karma rewarding me for good behavior or will Karma punish me for absconding with the sodas? They aren’t mine, and I did have options short of canvassing the neighborhood for their rightful owner. I would like to think Karma is somehow paying me back for all the sodas that exploded in our garage during the recent cold snap. We lost at least half a dozen and were left with a pile of slush and mangled aluminum.

So the sodas are staying in my front seat. For now.