Just Another Trashy Affair
I love my trash man.
It’s not really a physical thing. I couldn’t tell you the color of his eyes, or if his hair (golden or otherwise), rakes across his forehead in an unruly mane. I don’t know if his muscles ripple, or if he has a cute butt, so you can’t call me shallow. It’s not really a spiritual connection either. I don’t know his philosophy of life, or what kind of music and theater he likes. I don’t know if he likes kids or dogs or cats. I can’t tell you if he’s witty or dull, or even if he’s a good listener.
It doesn’t matter. I love him, anyway.
Every week, without fail, he fills my heart with joy and satisfaction when he comes by in his big, manly truck and hauls away my garbage. He doesn’t care how smelly it is. He doesn’t judge me for putting out one bag or six. I never hear him complain or criticize, yet right on schedule, like clockwork, he comes and takes the nastiest, yuckiest, least desirable of all I have to offer, tosses it handily into the bowels of the beast and drives away.
My husband doesn’t feel threatened, but this guy has my undying devotion.
I discovered this many years ago, when I was going through a purging phase and cleaning out our basement. We moved into the home of a contractor who had passed away some years before, leaving his widow to live alone in the house. After a number of years, as her health failed, she left her home to live with a daughter who could care for her in her final years. We rented the house for about a year and a half and did what we could to keep the house in repair and the yard cared for. When the contractor’s wife passed away and her daughter inherited the house, we were asked if we wanted to buy it. I truly believe it was the only house in all of the Seacoast area we could afford on my husband’s limited salary that would hold five kids and a big dog. We were thrilled to buy it, and she gave us a great deal because, she said, it pleased her to think of our children growing up there and loving the house as she had.
We didn’t use realtors, and there was no inspection done. The house came as was; i.e., the leaky roof, shredding wallpaper, unheated upstairs, asbestos wrapped pipes and ton (literally) of scrap metal in the basement were all part of the package. The 900 square foot basement was completely full of all kinds of artifacts from the contractor’s business, from which he retired in the early 70’s. There was the old safe and several heavy old wooden desks that had been converted into work benches, with drawers still full of screws and bolts and other odds and ends. There were dozens of boxes, wooden and cardboard, filled with pipe fittings and discarded scraps of metal and stuff I can’t even describe. There were old coat hangers, bent into circles and hanging from the rafters, threaded with hundreds of belt buckles and metal rings. He saved everything, like many folks who endured the Great Depression. There were stacks of newspapers and piles and piles of wood scraps and trim and flooring, and heavy wooden and metal shelves filled with old paint cans, wallpaper paste, ceiling tiles and more. It all had to go.
Thus began my infatuation with my trash man. Don’t misunderstand me – I was politically and environmentally correct and responsible in my disposal of this debris. I am a dedicated recycler, and have a compost bin in my yard for organic stuff from the kitchen, but this was not your run-of-the-mill household refuse. The really scary stuff I hauled off on Hazardous Waste Disposal Day (capitalized to denote the importance of this annual festival in our household during those years). The metal was graciously taken by a friend of ours who had a metal disposal bin at his work. I tried calling a scrap metal guy at one point, thinking I might make a few dollars off the stash, but he wanted me to sort the metal by type before he would even come to see if he wanted to take any of it. Short of testing each piece with a magnet, I had no clue where to begin that project, so I let my friend load his van up about every third month for a year or two and dump it at his work. This kind soul remains nameless in case his was some kind of clandestine activity. I think the statute of limitations runs out after 15 years anyway.
So, anything my trash man could take away was cream on top! After about three or four years, it was finally completely cleaned out. Well, almost. The last thing to go was the safe. It was huge – the kind you see in old cowboy movies in the back of the bank – black and on wheels with the company logo in script across the door, and it weighed several hundred pounds. The contractor’s family assured me there was nothing of value in it, that no one could remember the combination, and that they had no interest in having it. I tossed around the idea of using it as some kind of focal point in my basement décor, but it was the wrong height for a coffee or end table, and I could just never bring myself to do the whole old-west bank theme down there. My metal-hauling friend did try his hand at cracking the safe a couple of times. Apparently there’s more skill involved in that than one might think, even without the threat of potential arrest, and with the use of power tools. Who knew? When we replaced our furnace a few years ago, we paid the guy who hauled off the old boiler thirty bucks to take the safe too, and with it went the very last of the mementos from our contractor.
As the years have passed and we have progressed from the old way of putting out trash to our new pay-per-use blue bag system, there have been plenty of purging sessions in our home. The house isn’t large, and we don’t have a garage, so there’s no place to stash stuff. It either has a use, or it’s outta here. Yard sales never work for me; $32.50 just isn’t worth the effort. I take the useable stuff to Goodwill, but it’s hard to explain the thrill I get from cleaning out a closet, filling a couple of trash bags with junk, and knowing that they will mystically disappear if I just leave them on the sidewalk on Monday morning! Granted, after the intensity of those early years, I should admit that some of the passion may have faded, but I will always love my trash man.
Now, the guy in the plow truck who dumps the snow at the top of my driveway just after I’ve shoveled it clear? That’s another story.
It’s not really a physical thing. I couldn’t tell you the color of his eyes, or if his hair (golden or otherwise), rakes across his forehead in an unruly mane. I don’t know if his muscles ripple, or if he has a cute butt, so you can’t call me shallow. It’s not really a spiritual connection either. I don’t know his philosophy of life, or what kind of music and theater he likes. I don’t know if he likes kids or dogs or cats. I can’t tell you if he’s witty or dull, or even if he’s a good listener.
It doesn’t matter. I love him, anyway.
Every week, without fail, he fills my heart with joy and satisfaction when he comes by in his big, manly truck and hauls away my garbage. He doesn’t care how smelly it is. He doesn’t judge me for putting out one bag or six. I never hear him complain or criticize, yet right on schedule, like clockwork, he comes and takes the nastiest, yuckiest, least desirable of all I have to offer, tosses it handily into the bowels of the beast and drives away.
My husband doesn’t feel threatened, but this guy has my undying devotion.
I discovered this many years ago, when I was going through a purging phase and cleaning out our basement. We moved into the home of a contractor who had passed away some years before, leaving his widow to live alone in the house. After a number of years, as her health failed, she left her home to live with a daughter who could care for her in her final years. We rented the house for about a year and a half and did what we could to keep the house in repair and the yard cared for. When the contractor’s wife passed away and her daughter inherited the house, we were asked if we wanted to buy it. I truly believe it was the only house in all of the Seacoast area we could afford on my husband’s limited salary that would hold five kids and a big dog. We were thrilled to buy it, and she gave us a great deal because, she said, it pleased her to think of our children growing up there and loving the house as she had.
We didn’t use realtors, and there was no inspection done. The house came as was; i.e., the leaky roof, shredding wallpaper, unheated upstairs, asbestos wrapped pipes and ton (literally) of scrap metal in the basement were all part of the package. The 900 square foot basement was completely full of all kinds of artifacts from the contractor’s business, from which he retired in the early 70’s. There was the old safe and several heavy old wooden desks that had been converted into work benches, with drawers still full of screws and bolts and other odds and ends. There were dozens of boxes, wooden and cardboard, filled with pipe fittings and discarded scraps of metal and stuff I can’t even describe. There were old coat hangers, bent into circles and hanging from the rafters, threaded with hundreds of belt buckles and metal rings. He saved everything, like many folks who endured the Great Depression. There were stacks of newspapers and piles and piles of wood scraps and trim and flooring, and heavy wooden and metal shelves filled with old paint cans, wallpaper paste, ceiling tiles and more. It all had to go.
Thus began my infatuation with my trash man. Don’t misunderstand me – I was politically and environmentally correct and responsible in my disposal of this debris. I am a dedicated recycler, and have a compost bin in my yard for organic stuff from the kitchen, but this was not your run-of-the-mill household refuse. The really scary stuff I hauled off on Hazardous Waste Disposal Day (capitalized to denote the importance of this annual festival in our household during those years). The metal was graciously taken by a friend of ours who had a metal disposal bin at his work. I tried calling a scrap metal guy at one point, thinking I might make a few dollars off the stash, but he wanted me to sort the metal by type before he would even come to see if he wanted to take any of it. Short of testing each piece with a magnet, I had no clue where to begin that project, so I let my friend load his van up about every third month for a year or two and dump it at his work. This kind soul remains nameless in case his was some kind of clandestine activity. I think the statute of limitations runs out after 15 years anyway.
So, anything my trash man could take away was cream on top! After about three or four years, it was finally completely cleaned out. Well, almost. The last thing to go was the safe. It was huge – the kind you see in old cowboy movies in the back of the bank – black and on wheels with the company logo in script across the door, and it weighed several hundred pounds. The contractor’s family assured me there was nothing of value in it, that no one could remember the combination, and that they had no interest in having it. I tossed around the idea of using it as some kind of focal point in my basement décor, but it was the wrong height for a coffee or end table, and I could just never bring myself to do the whole old-west bank theme down there. My metal-hauling friend did try his hand at cracking the safe a couple of times. Apparently there’s more skill involved in that than one might think, even without the threat of potential arrest, and with the use of power tools. Who knew? When we replaced our furnace a few years ago, we paid the guy who hauled off the old boiler thirty bucks to take the safe too, and with it went the very last of the mementos from our contractor.
As the years have passed and we have progressed from the old way of putting out trash to our new pay-per-use blue bag system, there have been plenty of purging sessions in our home. The house isn’t large, and we don’t have a garage, so there’s no place to stash stuff. It either has a use, or it’s outta here. Yard sales never work for me; $32.50 just isn’t worth the effort. I take the useable stuff to Goodwill, but it’s hard to explain the thrill I get from cleaning out a closet, filling a couple of trash bags with junk, and knowing that they will mystically disappear if I just leave them on the sidewalk on Monday morning! Granted, after the intensity of those early years, I should admit that some of the passion may have faded, but I will always love my trash man.
Now, the guy in the plow truck who dumps the snow at the top of my driveway just after I’ve shoveled it clear? That’s another story.
I feel like you've written about the trash man before, or was it the mailman? I just can't remember. You should start tagging public servants as one of your labels!
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