cleaning up the neighborhood. one twelve-pack at a time.

Last Saturday, it seemed like the right thing to do.  We needed to get the big car in for service (the big car being the 14 mpg Tahoe which Miz Susan now refers to as "my car"; as in hers).  It seemed like a nice Saturday morning to drive the big car over to the service station and then hoof it home.  What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?  Acting locally and all that good stuff.  Not much but it was instructive.

We have a new service station, Grand Wheeler at the corner of Grand and Wheeler.  As opposed to Grand Wheeler II down the street at the corner of Grand and Hamline.  And as definitely opposed to Novick's Super Service (R.I.P.), the garage of which still sits, now unoccupied, at the corner of Snelling and Saratoga.  Harvey Novick locked up the doors on his garage for the last time this past summer.  It was an emotional time for Harv and his employee Tony (not that Tony would ever let on) and the dozens of people who stopped by to pay their respects at the farewell party back in  June.  I had Harvey on the verge of tears as I told him how much he'd meant to me and all the extended family and what a true gentleman he was.

There was no question that we felt like we'd been tossed into a sort of automotive void.  Neither Miz Susan nor I had ever learned the first thing about cars other than where to stick the key in to start the car and where to put the business end of the hose on a gas pump to ensure that the car would go somewhere once we've started it.  I guess neither one of has much of a mechanical turn of mind.  But Harvey had recommended Grand Wheeler as a substitute for his own shop and we'd been there once or twice late in the summer.  So, off to Grand Wheeler last Saturday morning before Miz Susan had dragged her a.., well, you know what I mean...out of bed.  I do have to give her credit for remembering that we needed to get the car in, something that had slipped off of my radar completely.

The drive down to the shop was uneventful and comfortable.  I had no cause for concern.  I was driving a car which had started, had gas in the tank and had a working heater. I should have been paying closer attention to the advantages of a working heater on a morning when the outdoor temperature was 8°.  Above zero but still nippy.

I ddn't really start paying attention to those 8 degrees until I started the walk home.  Into a light breeze from somewhere well north of the county line.  Brrrrrrr.  I was dressed plenty warm enough until I started playing good citizen and picking up empty beer bottles and cans.  I imagined that these had been left by various Macalester and St. Thomas partiers with maybe a Ramsey Jr. High 7th grader chipping in.  The empty beer bottles and cans which I was picking up (especially the two bottles) had had the evening and the early morning hours to get nicely chilled, probably down to about 8°.  That chill quickly made it through the fleece linings of my cheap Menard's gloves and turned my hands into frozen claws perfectly formed to clutch beer bottles by the necks.  I started crushing the cans and sticking those into my pockets and by the time I'd gotten home my little collection had grown to 9 dead soldiers.  There were the 2 beer bottles which claimed to have previously contained two different Belgian ales, 2 Natural Ice tallboy cans, 2 Hamm's cans and 3 assorted pop cans.  The Natural Ice and Hamm's cans I found lying near each other.  What an odd pair those two drinkers/litterers must have been.

I laid my booty out on the front porch though Miz Susan must not have been impressed.  She later scooped them up and tossed them into a bag of domestically produced empties for eventual recycling pick up.  She not only doesn't have a mechanical turn of mind, she doesn't have much respect for the fruits of good citizenship.

The two of us ran around for a bit that afternoon.  Mindless and aimless middle class consumerism, most likely.  And apparently totally forgettable since I can't remember a single thing we did or bought or place we stopped in.  I've become such a tool.

I do remember my haul of empties on my walk back down Grand Avenue to get the car and pay for the two new tires.  Which, incidentally, I'm now trying to pass off as Miz Susan's major Christmas present for the year.  Pathetic, I know, but it beats the lemon zester I've threatened her with.  Anyway, I found another Natural Ice tallboy can (I'd seen it earlier but couldn't juggle one more empty along with the nine I'd already been carrying on the first leg of my little walk.  No complementing Hamm's can, though; maybe those two drinkers just weren't meant to be a thing.), a half empty Odell's IPA bottle and, finally and for a little touch of class, a Miller Light can.  I risked an open bottle citation by dumping them onto the floor of the back seat and brought them home.  Pretty good work for a Saturday.  New tires, a couple of walks and a twelver's worth of empty cans and bottles headed for the recyclers rather than cluttering up the landscape.

So what was instructive about all this?  The people who left those cans and bottles laying on the sidewalks and in peoples' gardens weren't any more responsible than I'd been 45 years ago when I was starting in on my drinking career.  I'd like to think that I'm a smidge more responsible now but I'm having a hard time understanding why it's so hard for other people to do a little better.  At work, I have to grit my teeth regularly as I pull cans and bottles and paper and plastic bags out of trash cans where that stuff should never have been dumped in the first place.  It's going on everywhere.  What the hell?