I Found Gold On Main Street
One of the pre-school teachers in whose class I was working collected those titanium ring-pull things from soft drink cans to send to a charity that turns them into lightweight artificial limbs for kids in Third World countries who are victims of landmines.
So wherever I walked, I kept my eyes on the ground in search of them, and I found hundreds.
One morning as I was crossing Main Street on my way to work, I saw something yellow and shiny on the road, just near the traffic lights. I thought maybe it was a piece of the foil from a cigarette packet, scrunched up tight. But when I nudged it with my foot, it gave a tiny tinkle.
As soon as I picked it up I knew from its weight that it was a little nugget of pure gold!
It had a bezel on it -a little loop of gold to hold a chain- and it smelled strongly of cheap perfume. I invented a story in my head to explain its presence here in the middle of suburbia, speculating that someone's girlfriend had become annoyed with her partner and torn the nugget from the chain around her neck, and flung it from their moving car.
The nugget weighed 11 grams -just over a third of an ounce- and at that stage the price of gold was about $600/oz.
When I sold it to a jeweler, he gave me $250 for it... not bad for something I literally picked up off the street!
