Professor has this habit of carrying around various items of detritus and items, and he gets really upset when he loses them or leaves them somewhere! To the untrained eye, these items are just trash – an old red “passport cover”; a broken pencil. Sometimes it’s a bottle cap or even a piece of paper with a few letters written on it. He is known to pick up trash from the ground and want to keep these things in his pockets.

To me, being a slight (okay, more than slight) germophobe, picking stuff up off the ground or carrying around grubby or sticky items is sort of disgusting. I especially feel this way when he asks me to hold something for him and I recoil slightly (“It’s okay, L. It’s not dirty. Here, hold it here!”). I am always curious as to why he’s so attached to these, to me, insignificant pieces of trash, so one day in the car, I asked him.

He thought about it for awhile, and then answered, “Well, they’re treasures. I know they look like garbage, but I like them.”

I smiled. “You know, they say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. So I get that.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that when some people throw things away, other people find them and want them for themselves. It’s their treasure.”

“So trash can be treasure?”

“Yeah, to some people.”

He thought about it for a moment, and then grinned. “I think that’s true. And it’s like recycling!”

“Well, yeah, it is a form of recycling, sure.”

“No, L. I mean recycling is LIKE this. Because we throw away something and then they make new things out of it. New treasures!”

I think he’s got the right idea