I’m terrible at managing the household garbage. Don’t get me wrong—I know the basics. What goes in the garbage is whatever you can crumple into a ball and backboard off the kitchen window. But I still make mistakes. A couple weeks ago, when I saw an enormous quantity of glue and macaroni heaped upon scraps of colored paper, I assumed it was garbage and not, as my wife pointed out, our son’s very well made Christmas present. How was I supposed to know it was a Christmas present? The word “Christmas” does not, as I know it, begin with a “k” and end with saliva. Thankfully, my wife caught my mistake in time and blocked the shot.
Not that I would’ve made it anyway. Our undersized kitchen garbage cans are designed for a family with zero children and even fewer adults. They are far too small. In a normal family, this might mean having to make frequent trips to the garage. But in our family, we do not abide by the rule “whoever tops it off, drops it off.” We build Jenga-like towers of garbage that are tall enough to imperil hot air balloons—all to avoid a thirty-second walk to the garage.
This all assumes, of course, that we’ve done our civic duty and separated the garbage from the recycling. Distinguishing the two isn’t easy, but you can help the process along by subjecting each item to the following questions: Has it reached the end of its useful life? Can it be readily repurposed, reprocessed, or transformed? Is there any room left in the garbage can? If the answer to any of these questions is no, it’s recycling.
I have an excellent understanding of one thing, though: the garbage truck. My son recently asked me “where the garbage goes,” and in a ribbon-worthy exhibition of fathering, I explained it in terms he could understand.
“The garbage gets eaten by the garbage truck,” I said, “which is a colossal metal monster that snatches unsuspecting garbage cans from the driveway, jerks them until their heads pop off, and feasts upon their insides and all human happiness... Does that make sense?”
“Uh…”
“Also, it comes like clockwork every Thursday morning just as you’re heading off to school.”
I must have made the scene of the garbage truck very real to him, because he keeps re-living it in his sessions with Dr. Flynn.
I love this
Hilarious!