Yesterday on a walk, I saw a dollar in the grass next to the soccer field.

Typically, I pick up cash I see on the ground. I don’t know exactly how the universe operates in regards to this kind of thing, but walking past orphaned money without making the effort to collect it seems like the wrong message to send out.

I also wondered if maybe this might have been one of my dollars to begin with—one of the dollars I had recently exchanged for tamales or coffee or coconuts. Maybe it was trying to find its way home.

Then I thought about the homeless men who camp there. They watch the soccer games, and give each other haircuts, and cook family meal on the public grill beneath the Cyprus tree.

I left the dollar where it was. I thought it might have fallen out of a homeless man’s pocket: the tattered pocket of the jeans he picked up from the sidewalk where some neighbor had left them hoping a desperate human might be able to use them.

Those jeans. That pocket. Not my dollar.