Tuesdays the garbageman comes to our house. He comes before I get up. I hear his truck grinding down the street in the dark, and I lie in bed thinking about how he's about to pick up all the unwanted debris of this week or last month or even a year ago and cart it away.
I don't often think of much else. It's too early in the morning. Usually I can't remember what's in the garbage. I've already said goodbye to it when I threw it in the garbage can sometime earlier in the week. I do know it is the discards, junk, dirt, the unwanted surplus of life. I'm glad to let all that go. Getting rid of it helps to unclutter the house and make room for things more current and important.
Lying there this particular Tuesday morning, though, I did, for some reason, remember all the things that had gone into this week's garbage: some old pieces of carpet, a few empty cereal boxes, leaves swept up from the driveway, letters I'd cleaned out of my files, trash in general--none of it much use except as landfill or compost.
I think about how each of these items once played some useful role in my life: the leaves, for instance, brightening my spring with their green, lending some shade in the summer, coloring up the lawn in the fall after they had fallen to the ground.
I think of the letters I'd written, whether in anger, love or just for information, and the replies I've received, all filled with items once of vital importance (else why would I have saved them so long?).
The carpet is the remnants of what we call our "new" carpet; that is, it was new two years ago, and it marked the first time we'd gotten new carpet in a long time. It was something we felt we had earned, and so even though it cost a lot, we bought it. That's something to remember when you toss the excess out.
So my thoughts about the garbage were good ones. I thought of how gathering and putting out the garbage is a necessary part of life. If we had no way to dispose of garbage--as may one day be the case--the world would not be so nice a place in which to live. Indeed, it might not be a place in which we could live at all.
Then I thought how it would be if we could do the same thing with our minds, as if we could somehow dump all our unwanted memories and unneeded mental information into some spiritual garbage can, someplace where it would be permanently gone from our minds.
But, of course, that isn't the way it works. Our minds retain a lot we'd like to forget. We remember the person we slighted or insulted or ignored, probably long after they have forgotten how we treated them.
We think of the friends we've lost to death because their departure has left a hole in our lives. Unfortunately, unlike what goes into the garbage, these holes cannot be filled with someone new.
We remember places we've loved and times when we've visited them, and we're certain that we'll never see those places again, certainly not in the same way and in the same time.
For we've discovered that unlike the garbage that goes in the garbage can, the memories we carry in our minds have a time dimension. We cling to some of the garbage of memory long after it has any usefulness for us, long after it has become nothing but nostalgia and sentimentality. Unlike the "new" carpet or the now-useless letters, some things just can't be tossed out. They cling to us no matter what we do.
They float up into our consciousness at odd times, often, it seems, in the middle of the night, stuck in our innermost core as if they weren't garbage at all, but something very vital.
So maybe they're not really useless after all. Maybe they're what makes us human, beings capable of making mistakes and yet remembering them; able to recall those we love even after they're gone; seekers of times and places we can't recover, events so fleeting and yet so permanent a part of our lives they will live as long as we will.
If they really were garbage, we would be able to do without all of them. Else, as with what I tossed out last week, they would have long since been forgotten. But they're not. They're what makes us more than the inanimate objects we chuck into the trash each week. They're what makes us humans.
That's what I thought when I heard the garbageman this morning.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Saratoga News.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, January 29, 1997.
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