Steve and I pulled trash for four solid hours continuously, except for about five minutes when we stopped to talk. My shoulder hurt badly each time I put another full barrel on it, and my legs occasionally trembled as I was heading for the street. But the rest of me said, “Go, trashman, go.”

I could not have imagined there would be joy in this. Dump. Lift. Walk. Lift. Walk. The hours flew by. Saturday meant many people were outdoors working in their gardens or greenhouses. Most of them looked approachable enough. There wasn’t time for lengthy talks but enough to exchange greetings that go with civilized ways. But I was shocked to find that this wasn’t the case.

When I said hello to them, most often the response was either nothing at all, or a surprising stare because I had spoken.

One woman in a housecoat was startled as I came around the corner of her house. At the sound of my greeting, she gathered her housecoat tightly about her and retreated quickly to the door. I heard the lock click.

Steve complained angrily on the long ride to the dump: “They don’t realize we’re humans.”

I had originally planned to stay at this employment for only two days but now I’m going to continue. I have decided, too, to keep saying hello in people’s yards. It doesn’t do any harm, and it still feels right. Frankly, I’m doing an essential task. I left this country a little cleaner than I found it this morning. Not many people can say that tonight.

John Gardner wrote that a society which praises its philosophers and looks down on its plumbers（管子工）is in trouble. “Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water,” he warned. He might have gone a step further and called for respect for both our economists and our trashmen; otherwise, they’ll both leave rubbish behind.

Before Christmas Eve in 1870 Richard Wagner and his wife, Cosima, had agreed not to buy each other Christmas presents. They were simply too poor. But Wagner was planning a surprise gift.

For more than two months he had been crafting a piece of music to be performed outside Cosima’s bedroom door on Christmas morning. He had based it on themes later to be used in his opera Siegfried, plus a little nursery song he had written for their children two years earlier. He completed the Siegfried Idyll three weeks before Christmas and arranged for conductor Hans Richter to choose the members of the small orchestra. Richter conducted secret rehearsals, first in Zurich then at a hotel in Lucerne.

Wagner invited philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to the final rehearsal on Christmas Eve at the Hotel du Lac and they arrived together at the Wagners’ home in the village of Trihschen. There they found Cosima decorating the Christmas tree and preparing presents for the children.

At seven o'clock on Christmas morning the musicians arrived and quietly arranged themselves on the stairs outside Cosima’s room. They began to play.

“As I awoke to the light of dawn,” Cosima said later, “my mind passed from one dream into another. Familiar sounds from Siegfried came to my ears. It was as if the house or more accurately our entire being, was rising up in music and going up to heaven. Sacred memories, birdsong and sunrise, interwoven with music from Siegfried calmed my heart and I came to realize that I was not dreaming, and yet was experiencing the most wonderful one of all dreams. Now at last I understood all of Richard’s writing in secret.”

And yet Wagner had kept his promise not to buy his wife a Christmas present. December 25th was Cosima’s birthday.

Alex Elman runs a big business — something difficult to imagine after she lost her sight in her twenties. But Elman says that losing her sight helped her focus on finding success.

Elman’s father planted a hillside vineyard in western Massachusetts in 1981. It’s where Elman fled during the darkest period of her life. When she was 27 years old, she went blind due to complications from juvenile diabetes (糖尿病) 17 years ago. She recalled, “I hid in my home. I hid in the place. For me, that was the safest place in the world.”

Elman is now the founder of Alex Elman Wines, a growing portfolio (系列产品) of organic wines from all around the world: Chianti from Italy, Torrontes from Argentina. Elman doesn’t work alone. Her assistant, a guide dog named Hanley, is something of a wine snob, and quite a beggar. Hanley travels to all of the wineries that Elman does, from South America to Europe.

At first, Elman resisted the idea of a guide-dog. Now it’s hard to imagine her life, or her business, without him. She said. “When someone tells me something is organic and I don’t really believe it because I taste something funny on it, I’ll put it in front of his face and if he likes the wine, he’ll go to sniff it. If it’s not right, he’ll turn his head away. He gets in the dirt with me. He scratches around. He makes sure that we see earthworms and butterflies. That’s how we know that the soil is actually organic, and that there are no chemicals.”

Elman told CBS News she believes the loss of her vision was a gift. She said, “It allowed me to pay attention to what I thought was important and also to be able to teach people that the broken hang nail is not a big deal, you know what I mean? Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t sweat the big stuff either.”

A bargain is something offered at a low and advantageous price. A more recent definition is: a bargain is a dirty trick to force money out of the pockets of silly and innocent people.

The cost of producing a new—for example—toothpaste would make 80 p the proper price for it, so we will market it at £ 1.20. It is not a bad toothpaste, and as people like to try new things it will sell well to start with; but the attraction of novelty soon fades, so sales will fall. When that happens we will reduce the price to £ l. 15. And we will turn it into a bargain by printing 5 p OFF all over it.

Sometimes it is not 5 p OFF but l p OFF. What breathtaking rudeness to advertise l p OFF your soap or washing powder or whatever! Even the poorest old-age pensioner ought to regard this as an insult(侮辱), but he doesn’t. A bargain must not be missed. People say one has to have washing powder(or whatever)and one might as well buy it a penny cheaper.

The real danger starts when unnecessary things become “bargains”. Many people just cannot resist bargains. Provided they think they are getting a bargain they will buy clothes they will never wear or furniture they have no space for. Once I heard of a man who bought an electric saw as a bargain and cut off two of his fingers the next day. But he had no regrets: the saw had been truly cheap.

Quite a few people actually believe that they make money on such bargains. A lady once told me: “I’ve had a lucky day today. I bought a dress for £120, reduced from £400; and I bought a beautiful Persian carpet for £600, reduced from £900.” It will never occur to her that she has actually wasted £720. She feels as though she had made £ 580. She also feels, I am sure, that if she had more time for shopping, she could make a living out of it.

Some people buy in large quantities because it is cheaper. Once a couple bought enough sugar for their lifetime and the lifetime of their children and grandchildren. They thought it a bargain not to be missed. When the sugar arrived they didn’t know where to store it —until they realized that their toilet was a very spacious one. So that was where they piled up their sugar. Not only did their guests feel rather strange whenever they were offered sugar to put into their coffee, but the toilet became extremely sticky.

To offer bargains is a commercial trick to make the poor poorer. When greedy fools fall for this trick, it serves them right.