Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the splendid table.

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Talk to you soon. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. slow down. In ninth grade, my friend John walked the neighborhood early mornings with his father and two brothers.

They scoured the streets in the dark for empty bottles and aluminum cans that they sold at a scrap yard on Ridge Avenue.

John's father suffered from a work-related injury which disqualified him from many jobs.

Yet, it seemed he always felt This qualified him from many jobs.

Yet, it seemed he always found a way to earn a dollar.

The dull clack of a crushed soda can,

or the bright ping of a glass bottle, landing into an old rickety grocery cart often woke me up as it did other boys in our crew.

The first time we learned it was John and his siblings making the noise in the pre-dawn hours, he denied it.

One guy, our trees, teased them all the time during lunch break, which made John feel ashamed of his

family's lack of resources. Eventually he stopped coming to the basketball court

where we gathered after school.

But the truth was that all of our parents sought some kind of way to cut corners,

to save or make extra money, A side job on the weekends, food coupons,

hammy down clothes, a small plot in the community garden. My mother even called John's family industrious. Today's poem

dignifies the lives of people and low-income neighborhoods whose early practices of thrift and ingenuity created intrinsic values

...