Saturday At The Dumpster

Another Saturday and another trip to the dump. The joys of adulthood!! Actually it's not so bad. I get out of the house for a little while, run errands, and get to think away from the hubbub of two daughters and a wife who's usually grumpy in the morning although lately we seem to be shifting moods a little. It's a long way from the Saturdays of youth when I would get up as early as the first cartoon, then spend most of the morning watching my favorites before going outside for the rest of the day. Now, with cable and videos, DVD's, and computers kids can see cartoons 24 hours a day. I probably watch more now. The current faves are Teen Titans and Codename: Kid's Next Door.

Dumps have changed too. When I was a child the main dump was open to everybody. You'd just drive right in and throw your trash wherever you liked. I used to love going to the dump with my father because he used to try and find treasure out of the chaos. The sickly sweet decaying smell made me want to gag, but there was always the chance I might get a battered toy out of the deal. Some people are just attracted to junk and my father is one of those people. But he's not quite what I call a dump person.

Dump people live their lives rooting through trash. There were even folks in Ripley, Mississippi that lived in the dump. My grandmother lived a few miles down the road and we would see the dump people's children riding their bikes to a convenience store up the street. These kids were always half naked under the hot sun riding bicycles cobbled together from ones that had been discarded. There were chopper style bikes, bikes with steering wheels instead of handle bars, ape hangers, banana seats, and they were all different colors since they had been pieced together. We were instructed to never speak to them because they lived at the dump. We were poor white trash, but they were even beyond that. I guess they were just plain trash.

My father didn't care. When we lived in Ripley briefly during the early 70's running a restaurant named Raney's Cafe he would go to the dump and talk to its inhabitants. It never mattered to him that they lived in tarpaper shacks among the garbage. All of grandmother's admonitions to us grandchildren to stay away from them worked on me. Even my father couldn't convince me that the dump people were okay, that either they were down on their luck or just simply had chosen to live a different way from us. When I visited my grandmother I would lay awake at night in terror that one of the dump people were going to come in through an open window (this was summer Mississippi with no air conditioning) and drag me off to live with them.

Now on Saturday mornings I ponder garbage and cartoons. Don't even get me started about lawn mowing.