Digging for Copper

"You take your time honey," the cashier says to the older man in front of me as he fumbles with his change. Her long, resigned face and her protuberant eyes give her a slightly melancholy look, like an icon of a saint in an Orthodox church. "He's a very patient man," she says, referring to me.

He looks at me with watery blue eyes from beneath a shock of white hair and smiles apologetically as he holds out a handful of nickels and dimes, but "I thought I had more pennies," he says.