When he retired he had a plan. At least one day a week he would try to make a little money.
First he helped people with computer problems, but that turned into a Pandora's box, so he gave up on that one. Then he picked up beer cans to get back the deposit. One day a very angry woman in a strange hat accosted him and accused him of trespassing on her territory. He hadn't realized that he had disrupted the social order of the roadside can and bottle collectors. Nothing was simple.
Then he was on-call fry cook at a local restaurant, but on-call turned out to be seven days a week and that was no good,
Then he had an idea. Poetry. Poetry wasn't hard. You just wrote down words that sounded good together. He sat in the kitchen and gave it a try. The poems just rolled out of him. He read them to his dog. The dog thought they needed work, but she said nothing. His wife had been going quietly mad since he retired. She screamed and ran out of the house and got in her car and drove away when he read to her the third time.
After three months of poetry it occurred to him that he wasn't making any money. He knew he'd never sell his poems to a publisher. He went to Kinkos and had a booklet made of what he thought were his better poems, but he couldn't sell the little volumes for the fifteen dollars that would have broken him even.
He tried making five cent copies and selling his poems door to door and on the street. He was a distinguished looking man. He'd been told he bore a resemblance to Noam Chomsky who he'd never heard of but it had to be a complement didn't it?
People were very courteous. Most of us have fifty cents for a poem.
When his wife died he bought a Winnebago and hit the road. North in the summers, south in the winters he wandered the mid west selling his poems.
When he died in Linton North Dakota one June, they found his Winnebago stuffed with poems - all neatly piled in cardboard boxes.
They filled a whole recycle bin.