I am The Can Man.

In the same way that the woman who runs through Downtown in her street clothes is The Lady Who Runs, and the man who prematurely drove on the unfinished Fort Duquesne Bridge and survived to become The Guy Who Drove Off The Bridge To Nowhere, I am The Can Man.

My second-grader is the only one who calls me that now, but I'm on a slippery slope. One day, I'll retire from this gig, and if I don't stop picking up cans on my walks through the city, I'm going to be The Can Man and nothing else. I know that and fear it.

I didn't set out to become an eccentric, or even quirky, but I can't help myself. My habit started when I fell into a good crowd. I blame Boris Weinstein, founder of Citizens Against Litter, who helped me organize a Trashapalooza clean-up on the event on the North Side last October, wherein four dozen volunteers picked up 185 bags of litter in 90 minutes. That felt good, even before the pizza and beer.

Mr. Weinstein, a generalist, picks up litter of all kinds, but not long after meeting him I began to specialize. I started picking up the cans I'd see on my walks to and from work. Aluminum is the most abundant metal on earth, which is no surprise if you walk the streets of Pittsburgh.

Has anyone ever walked an urban mile, or driven a highway one, without passing a half dozen or more empty cans? They're at curbside, on the sidewalks and in the grass. I've come to appreciate the ones crushed so thin by car tires that they're flatter than an envelope. They'll fit in any pocket.

I know. It's not socially acceptable; I probably get more sideways looks that the litterers themselves. Maybe I shouldn't come out as a can picker, but I've been at it six months and, honestly, it's mere coincidence that I began shortly before we all took a pay cut here at the Post-Gazette.

This began as an experiment to see how many pounds of cans I'd encounter in a year, but I've kept such an irregular tally that now I just keep doing it because I think Mom and Mahatma Gandhi would approve.

My mother throws around nickels like they're manhole covers. She's a coupon clipper, not a can picker-upper, but her sense of frugality must have been passed on even as I mocked it. I finally reacted to the wastefulness of seeing tons of useful metal everywhere, and thought I'd grab it before it reached the landfill or the rivers by way of the storm sewers.

Gandhi is a stretch, but I'm at least a partial believer in non-violence, not so much because I've studied the teachings of Gandhi but because I'm built like him. And I know he began India's independence movement with such basics as getting his countrymen and women to boycott foreign goods, especially British goods, and spin their own homespun clothes. I can't see myself wearing a homespun dhoti or giving up fried chicken, but I figure these cans are my small blow against our skyrocketing trade deficit and rampant energy consumption. The United States exports hundreds of millions of pounds of scrap aluminum each month, but only about half the cans produced are recycled.

I have only two rules. The first is "no reaching in.'' Once a can has been deposited in a trash can, it's dead to me.

Rule Two is respecting the professionals. On New Year's Day, I picked up dozens of cans but then saw a man and woman pulling cans from a bin behind a bar and loading them in a shopping cart. I gave 'em mine, and did the same on another day with a fellow in the park hauling a bag that rivaled Santa's. Theirs is a hard but honest hustle and should be respected. For that reason, I leave the stadium parking lots to them, too, while I attend to the strays.

I throw the flattened cans in a bag in our basement when I get home, wash up, and every few months walk a bag o' empties the few blocks to Warhola Scrap Metals on Pennsylvania Avenue. There Marty Warhola, Andy Warhol's nephew, hands me a few bucks and we shoot the breeze. In six months I've given him about 15 pounds of cans. He has given me about nine dollars. This ain't gold mining.

I imagine I'll slip out of this habit as easily as I slipped into it, but right now I've taken to carrying a cardboard folder that was given to me by a financial counselor. It is just right for my metals portfolio. Picking up empties doesn't take any more effort than that shown by the slob who threw the can down.