How Rich is This?

Or how stupid?
See this machine? It's purpose is to count your change for you---for a fee! I get it that some people like to come home and put their change in a jar and then cash it in or deposit it at the bank to see how much they saved kind of by accident when the jar is full. But how rich or busy do you have to be to not mind paying 8.9 cents on the dollar to have a machine count your change? The thing is, the people I usually see at this machine certainly don't dress or act or talk like they have so much money and so little time that they have to pay to have their money counted.

In the malls here, there is a place where you can literally throw your money away by watching it wind down a large funnel and down a hole and into the collection box below. I wish I had been the brilliant person who anticipated this easy way to make money. I don't have a photo, but you can understand what it looks like if you imagine a large black plastic funnel that is about a meter and half in diameter, set with the narrow end down onto a circular wooden base. There aren't any signs or instructions, but people here seem to know what to do. Walk up to the thing, stand a coin up on its edge on the outer edge of the funnel, and watch it roll in concentric circles before it falls through the hole in the center. I try to imagine such a thing in the middle of some public space in Brno and I just cannot. What Czech would throw money away like this? I have an idea what use just about any beer-drinking male would find for such a thing, and the only thing it might have to do with money is saving the 15kc charge at the public toilets.

The Only Ones

I was a little afraid of dead things when I was child. Once, when I was telling my father how scary it would be to live next to a cemetery, he said in that flat voice he usually reserved for answering stupid questions, "Why? THOSE are the only people on the earth who won't hurt you." Along the route to Bram's school, there are two cemeteries: on the west and east on the way in, and on the east and west on the way home. I notice these cemeteries not because there is a house right up against one of them or because I am feeling miserable or hollow (though I often am), but because what I see first are the flowers that have blown off the graves. For some reason, it really bothers me to see them there, ripped from the resting places of somebody's loved ones and lying like so much trash in the ditch and along the roadside. These days it's mostly red poinsettias or blue things or some kind of fluffy yellow spidery-looking flower I don't recognize. I would like to stop and to put them all back, but of course I can't. And that bothers me more than it should. I am sorry for the living who brought the flowers to the cemetery and how they must have felt about leaving first someone they loved and then the flowers and for the oblivious dead who now thanks to the wind, appear to lie there unmissed and ungrieved. But then, THEY are the only ones on earth who. . . .