I Know Who You Are

What a year it's been. In early March of 2011 I left all I knew behind in Idaho for a job in Providence, RI on a mission to kill my debt and provide a better life for a family I didn't yet hold claim to. I was in love with a girl I'd known since elementary school, but I wasn't sure we could survive a year of separation.

Fast forward to Easter/Passover weekend. I'm back in the habit of my daily walks wandering Providence as a specter of solitude. In the last year I've grown increasingly pessimistic about America's economic future and had taken to browsing coin shops now and again while stationed in Mississippi for Air Force tech school. I wandered into a shop and had an interesting conversation with the shop keeper.

Either he works on the side as a psychic or I'm not alone in my musings. I get buzzed in (such an east coast thing) to his shop just after noon. It was just he and I in the shop. He looked to be in his late sixties, dressed in slacks and a blazer that had been well worn. I asked him if he had any junk silver, to which he replied he did, I asked him the price per dollar and it was the same that coinflation (great tool by the way) was showing. He brought out the coins and I went through each one making sure it was of 1964 or older minting.

At this point he said, "You're military aren't you." To which I replied I was, and this was where the conversation got a little troubling... I told him I got into buying a little silver every payday while in Mississippi. For the last year I've wondered if I was being paranoid, or over-reacting to the negative economic news I've seen... So where better to ask than at a coin shop with a guy who doesn't know me from Adam. I asked him how he saw our economy going. 

To which he replied, "I know who you are, and you're not alone" which completely took me off guard. He said he'd been in that shop for over 40 years, and he'd primarily sold coins to collectors and foreigners who had come from a country where they didn't trust their own currency. He said that's changed in the last two years, for the first time in his life Americans are beginning to not trust their own currency. 

Perhaps I'm not nuts afterall...