garbage

It wasn’t always curb-side trash pickup everywhere…when I was a kid the garbage man (yes, they were always men) had these extra large barrels that they would carry or roll along on their edge. Not their side, but the edge of the bottom, sort of spinning it, sort of rolling it. Make it move without them having to really carry it. And they would come off the street to the house, and empty your one or two cans into their big can and then roll on back to the truck. Pretty efficient actually. (Except that curb-side is way more efficient.)

And then slowly the garbage companies disappeared, or more like “merged” into one company. (This was NJ in the early 70’s.) And the “new company” had these huge, bad-ass trucks that were black and shiny. They had characters painted on them like WWII planes, mascots with like, dice, hanging out of their mouth or whatever.  And everyone whispered the word “mafia” though it didn’t really mean anything concrete to me at that age. But that wasn’t our garbage company.

The guys who picked up our trash had a beat up old truck that looked like a, well, like a garbage truck. The guys looked like typical garbage men. But they didn’t always come regularly. Sometimes they missed a week, sometimes they had problems with their truck. And I know my mother always paid in advance without complaint and gave them a bonus around the holidays.

And I don’t know where my mother got her information, but clearly she was taking a stand. A minor stand on a minor point maybe, but mind you that she had no interest in giving our business to the big clean shiny bad-ass trucks with the cool black paint jobs. I didn’t entirely get it, but neither was I bothered by the choice either, though you could certainly see a kid wanting “the cool truck” to come to their house instead of the smelly old truck…but I didn’t really get all of that…except I guess I did.

We teach by doing, we learn by example even when we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing, we try to stand up for what’s right, we try to be empathetic of others less fortunate, we do what we can to help keep things in balance…Have a Happy Thanksgiving. (Unless you're Native American, in which case, my heart weeps for the genocide of your people.)