Stranger hobbies

The bookseller said ‘oops, I stole your five cents’. He reopens the drawer and gets me my change.
I laughed. 'Well that will make you rich', after a pause conceded: 'Well, actually I guess maybe they add up.'
He says ‘ I collect five cents’
I say ‘like a hobby?’
He says ‘ no, in a jar. At the end of the year I have maybe $40 worth, and I don’t know what to do with them'.
He is uncommonly tall, this man, and I have never spoken to him beyond the barest rudimentaries associated with the transaction of book buying. He is so much taller I think of him as living up there on a slightly different slice of life to me. Not tree top versus ground dweller exactly but nonetheless some different piece of sky our faces brush through daily.
‘It’s the kind of thing an old man would do’ he tells me somewhat ruefully, self chastising, but baffled at it to, like this jar and his five cent collecting sits beyond his own comprehension. His face, behind glasses, towering above me with his extra height, lights up, opens when he tells me this. I realise it’s the only exchange we’ve had like this, we are carving our new ground. He seems genuinely baffled at his own proclivities. We laugh together at his unknowable, unchartable, jar of the deep mysteries of ourselves and our own behaviours.