For all of the stuff I remember when I was a child, the one thing I don’t recall was how we handled our trash. I mean is it possible that I lived before trash. Probably not. I know we had garbage and trash. I just don’t know or remember what we did with it. I don’t remember us having plastic trash bags. Maybe they hadn’t been invented yet. Did we bury our garbage in the back yard? Surely not. We did have a post hole digger but surely that was only used to dig holes for posts. It is possible that since my dad grew up on a farm that he was familiar with composting. Honestly, I don’t remember any compost pile. It would have included coffee grounds, egg shells, potato peels… that kind of stuff. I don’t think the word recycle had been coined yet, at least as it ultimately related to certain parts of one’s refuge. I don’t remember sitting trash cans by the curb (actually we didn’t have curbs). Our neighborhood had dirt roads when we first moved there. So it would have been necessary to put our trash cans in front of our house near the street. Frankly, I do not remember garbage trucks, garbage men, the dump or any of these things related to the disposition of trash. Maybe we didn’t have trash then? Or we simply collected it and put it in the garage. My dad had enclosed our carport so we had a garage which meant we had a place to put garbage. I am sure that we either set trash cans out or took them somewhere. Maybe it wasn’t safe for either garbage trucks or garbage men to come to our neighborhood? There are a lot of unanswered questions in my mind. Whatever the case I don’t remember anything bad happening as a result of our contributions to the waste system. Having said that, I don’t even remember a weekly collection. At the end of the day there had to be something. Maybe it is that part of your brain that you don’t remember unpleasantness… only the good things. Trash couldn’t have fallen into the category of “good things”. You know how you don’t remember the pain of stepping on a nail, or having a tetanus shot, or pinching your finger in a car door, or falling off a bike at about 20 miles per hour. I know I don’t remember that pain once it dissipated. You are probably the same as me. I really want to move forward a few decades.
The first time I remember the weekly trash run was when we moved to San Jose. We got regular trash pickup every week. I don’t remember all the different receptacles, dark brown for garbage, green for yard clippings and blue for recycled stuff. I think we just had your basic metal trash cans. One thing that was for sure is that you did not want to miss that weekly pick up. It was incumbent on you to set your cans out the night before and rest easy knowing that the truck would be there in the morning and you would have empty cans to fill up for next week. Rue the day that you forgot to put out your trash for pick up. I have been there. It is not pretty. When you realize that the truck is coming and it may be too late to get your trash to the curb in time. Remember in Saving Private Ryan when you hear the sound of German tanks coming and it sent shivers down your back. In the same way, when I would hear the sound of the garbage truck and I knew that my time to get dressed and drag my cans to the curb was very limited that I might find myself with the impossible outcome of having my then full cans looming for another week. What were we supposed to do then? Not generate any trash for the ensuing week? Find other places to put the trash, or maybe jam this week’s offering so that you could make more room for the current week’s trash? On top of all of this you had to deal with the anger from your wife for being so irresponsible and forgetting to set out the trash on time. Couldn’t she have reminded me? I mean we are in this together and its not just my fault that we missed the pick up. Now we must face the consequences together. Sorry, she never saw this as a “we” screw-up. That fell squarely on my shoulders.
There was an alternative when you got missed. You cold make a trip to the dump. We actually were close to the most beautiful dump in the world. It was called the “Guadalupe Dump”. I will talk about that place in a future post. For now, one other alternative was to try to get the garbage man to come back. Seriously… there are few things more certain than a garbage man not coming back. You are really negotiating from an extremely weak position. You screwed up, you didn’t set your cans out on time, you got missed, see you next week. I immediately saw the folly in trying to convince these guys to come back. I won’t even attempt to go through how that conversation went. I mean what could possibly be the mitigating circumstances. There are no second chances in the world of trash pick up. These are hard lessons to learn but each of us has probably, at some point, been put in a similar situation and I would love to hear a story that suggests that you somehow got these waste management engineers to return and gladly pick up your trash. It just doesn’t happen. I will leave trash at this point… unlike when I got missed (Ha Ha). We will talk trash at some point in the future.
