On Tuesday mornings, the garbage truck would come into my five-year-old view from the staircase window—the truck’s square nose pausing in front of Mr. Rugland’s hedges.
The worker hanging on in back would hop off at Mr. Wenzel’s driveway, tossing one or two small bags into the truck. Mr. Wenzel was the high school English teacher, a single man in his forties. He never seemed to have much trash.
The worker would then walk a short distance to a silver can in front of John and Eileen Carter’s driveway. The Carter kids had grown by then, so it was just another two or three bags of trash, which the worker would toss with little effort into the back.
Before it reached my parents’ house, the garbage truck made three more stops. Pauses, really. I could hear the squeak of the brake, the engine idling in low gear, the sound of bags hitting the steel box. There was a rhythm. A sort of cheerful music that—had there been lyrics—might have gone something like this:
“Two elderly couples
and two widows.
A bag here. Two bags there.
It’s good to be a garbage man.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
But then the truck would reach the telephone pole at the end of my parents’ driveway. And that’s when the music slowed and the rhythm was lost.
You see, the truck didn’t pause at our house.
It didn’t even merely stop.
It parked.
I could hear the engine drop to a lower pitch. The driver’s door would swing open and Mr. Olson—a bearded man in a camouflage baseball cap—would climb down from his perch.
I don’t recall us being a particularly wasteful family, especially given the regular reminders about starving people in Africa and our ongoing, precarious membership in the Clean Plate Club. I don’t remember us throwing much away, either. My dad, for example, kept rusty nails and random bolts that filled coffee cans on a shelf in the garage. He hoarded scraps of lumber—anything he thought he could use to upgrade his deer stand or shore up the basement staircase. Mostly, though, it was stuff my friends and I used to build bike ramps and tree forts.
But for all we didn’t throw away, I guess it just wasn’t enough on Tuesday mornings. For a family of six, stuff adds up over the course of a week. And to deal with this, I learned, takes two grown men.
I imagine Mr. Olson now, hoping he simply needed to stretch his legs or wanted a change of scenery. That seeing our driveway didn’t produce in him a bitterness that grew little by little each week. Over the course of a career, that would add up. Perhaps later in life Mr. Olson would have anger issues. He would go to therapy and, despite many breakthroughs, he and his therapist just couldn’t trace the anger to its origins.
I imagine myself being there one day, on some strange chance or fluke of doctor–patient confidentiality—me popping up from behind a plant in the therapist’s office, reminding him about Tuesday mornings.
And there would be such relief on Mr. Olson’s face, his eyes welling with tears—the music fading back in. The distant sound of a garbage truck shifting into gear, rolling forward, and finding its rhythm again.