Hot Trash
For those who have always lived in an apartment or condo, you are not going to understand this post. But from someone who has only lived in houses, I just have to share the absolute thrill I get about 1-2 times a week.
Ready? It is going down the hall to the…garbage room…and putting garbage down the chute! It is magnified 9 times by the fact that I’m on the 9th floor. You may think it is odd that I get such tremendous pleasure out of something so mundane, but seriously – it is a highlight. I love squishing the bag to get it to fit into the chute …and then anticipating when it is going to plunge down to the bottom, and then the culmination of it crashing on top of the other garbage waiting to be compacted.
The only chutes we had growing up were laundry chutes. One in the main bathroom, and one in my sister’s room…they were back to back, merging into one above the laundry sink in the basement. My sister and I would spend inordinate amounts of time - me in the bathroom cupboard that I had emptied of its toilet paper rolls, and her in her bedroom, stretching our arms down the holes to see if we could touch fingers.
As an adult – I now realize we would each have had to have about 6-foot-long arms in order for this feat to be accomplished, but that didn’t occur to us then. It is also somewhat miraculous that we didn’t get stuck in the chutes. Oh, my mom would have been MAD!
We had very boring garbage cans at home too. My first memory is of silver cans that my dad would carry to the curb every week, and of the garbage trucks with garbage men, hanging on to the handles on the back of the trucks, who would jump down at every house and heft up the cans to empty them into the maw of the garbage truck.
Then, many years later, we graduated to the big rolling dumpster-type, green cans, and even later, added in a blue can for recycling and a brown one for yard waste. Hauling these trash receptacles is just a pain in the butt – especially when they’re full. In the snow, they fall down and you have to wrestle them up. Sometimes people steal them. Sometimes you put something ‘forbidden’ in them (like cement blocks or the wrong stuff in the recycling bin) and they won’t collect them at all. Sometimes the canyon winds would take them far, far away. And now there are no humans involved in feeding the garbage trucks, it is all mechanized with a giant claw-arm that comes out from the truck, hooks around the middle of the can, and lifts the can over the garbage truck upside down, and empties it in. The only human is the driver.
In New York, there is garbage everywhere. Oh, my heavenly days, the garbage. On Saturdays, huge mounds of clear plastic bags pile up outside buildings – sometimes in piles 8 feet high and 30 feet long – the detritus of life in the Big Apple. I don’t see the garbage trucks, but they must be there…but where does all that garbage go? This last week, it has been in the high 90’s with humidity around 70-80%. It is HOT. And there is a distinct aroma in Manhattan. Hot Trash. You can say it ‘Haute Garbawwge” if you’d like – but let me tell ya, there’s nothing like it. Makes a pretty good band name, too.
