There. I’ve said it.
Every Sunday, just before noon, I begin to yearn for my old BIRD shift. Donning that assertive yellow vest with the reassurance that one can Ask Me is akin to taking command of the bridge of a giant garbage scow.
I miss working in that vortex of aromatic rapture, that spot equidistant from the bottles full of cigarette butts and the overly tepid milk jugs. And I miss the perplexing issues of precise plastic genealogy: Infidel plastic, Alien plastic, Sacred plastic, all to meet again in a great molten netherworld.
I miss sending someone else’s kids to get all inkypants trampling down the mixed paper bin. I miss hoisting the very tiniest ones up to turn the key that fires up the Big Green Squasher Machine. I miss the lovely chaos that ensues when the crusher is full, the sign is up, but in minutes, we are interred below a corrugated mega-mound.
I miss that for-the-longers-time-never-quite-confirmed “what-is-light-metal?” rule. It held that if one person could lug something up, up, up to the bin, it was “light”.
This is how I met a small man who could carry a Royal Enfield motorcycle frame with the engine attached. I miss the sheer rush of fast-balling mustard jars into the back wall of Smithereen.
I miss the hissing sound made by the big plastic bags full of little plastic bags when you squish them down with your bum. I miss the poor souls whose soup cartons are flatly rejected but who are rarely shown the secret garbage can.
I miss the little warming room that, never that warm, morphed into a general depository of the unclassified, and now has migrated into the wider world of Dave. I miss delivering the glad tidings as we added, egg cartons, and light bulbs and toner and bubble-wrap to the growing list of tolerables. I miss telling convenient falsehoods like how we might be taking packing foam in a week or two if you’ll just put this pile back in your car.
In the not-good-enough-for-the-Nook aisle, I miss those deadly serious people with hoodies and Russian accents who always found high-tech treasures among the dead hairdryers and called me “sir.” I miss the radio, especially when it was blaring uncomfortably for two hours of the condescending impatience of Rex Murphy.
I miss taking the odd stealthy snapshot for purposes unspecified and asking everyone’s names and asking them again the following week. Despite the scoldings,
I miss the personal pleasure I took in leaving the gate open for those who left things to the last minute but perhaps shouldn’t be penalized by having to take a carload of kids and pet food cans to Grandma’s on the three o’clock ferry. Closing time was also when I got to raid the magazine rack for the New Yorker and Rolling Stone. I miss the music on the roof when it rains. I miss the Christmas lights.
I miss the church ladies and the cat ladies and the sheep people and their bins full of wasps. I miss exchanging deep thoughts with Dave, I miss explaining why white plastic bags were in fact, coloured. I even miss the scoundrels who just left their bags of garbage. But I don’t miss them a lot. I miss driving Miss Alicia home.
