Keepsakes & Other Stories

YESTERDAY'S GARBAGE

' YESTERDAY 5 GARBAGE 87 88 ...._________,·THE BEST GRADE OF GARBAGE in this city comes from the Hillcrest neighborhood , and on Thursdays when I make my run through the alleys of Hillcrest, my wife Caledonia rides beside me in the truck, admiring all those fancy back yards. Caledonia seldom climbs down out of the cab. She trusts me to inspect the garbage. I know her taste. It's jewelry and reading matter. Now by jewelry I don't mean diamonds and rubies. You won't find precious stones in people's garbage. I'm talking about the bigger, cheaper pieces-the kind a woman can pin on her coat. Last Thursday I came across two. One was a big-eyed owl sitting on a silver moon crescent. One of the owl's rhinestone eyes was missing, but we have scads of rhinestones in a box at home. We found one about the ' YESTERDAY 5 GARBAGE right size and glued it in the socket, and Caledonia wore it to bingo, where four people said how nice it looked. The other piece I found was a fancy letter of the alphabet, all complicated with curlicues. Caledonia thought it might be a capital C, but at the wrestling matches Saturday night somebody told her it looked more like an E, so now she wears it upside-down and it looks great. It doesn't look like anything. As for reading matter, it's newspapers and letters. Caledonia keeps an up-to-date file of newspapers, both the Star and the Tribune. I've never been too crazy about having all those newspapers in the house (we've had to close off two rooms upstairs because they got packed so full of paper), and I'm not too crazy about letters eitherespecially after what happened to Mrs. Nichols. But Caledonia likes to read, and sometimes in the evening she'll pull out an old letter and read it to me and ask me to identify whose garbage it came out of. I'm right about half the time. There's a certain brick house in Hillcrest where the garbage has always been worth a close look. Our tablecloth comes from that place, along with no end of ornamental whiskey bottles and the .22 revolver I shoot rats with at the dump. It was at that house one Thursday that a letter addressed to Mrs. George Nichols turned up in the trash I was dumping into the truck. I snatched it up and wiped off the grease (most people being in the habit of throwing out their mail with their table leavings) and I handed it up to Caledonia in the cab. She read it while I worked the compactor. Not all your garbologists have compactors, you 89 }ON HASSLER 90 know. My compactor is two years old, and now I don't see how I ever got along without it. I press a button near the tailgate and the compactor moves like a paddle wheel, pushing the garbage forward to the front of the truck. It keeps the trash from all piling up at the back end, and it squeezes it together so I only make about half as many trips to the dump as I used to. It isn't as slick as the compactors you see in junkyards that can press a car down to the size of a bicycle, but it's a real worksaver. And it's fun to monkey with. If you work it right, you can get a goodsized cat to fit in your pocket. When I climbed back into the cab that day, Caledonia said, "This letter is from a hospital out in California." I coasted downhill to my next stop as she read it to me. Dear Mrs. Nichols: Polly Jean's condition remains stable. Nearly a year has passed since her last serious withdrawal from reality. She remembers absolutely nothing about the Centennial parade nor what she did while it was in progress. Chemical treatment, as I insisted from the start, has proved the most efficacious means in cases like hers. I would not hesitate to release her today; however my colleagues suggest we wait one more month in order to be absolutely certain. Therefore, if she has suffered no setback by November 1, you may come for her. I assume by this time you have explained everything to Mr. Nichols. I suggest that both of you come out to California to take her home...