GARBAGE TRUCKS ARE GOOD THINGS

Well, today was garbage day in our neck of the woods....and it brought to mind another column by The "Pundit of Pittsview" .......

Yep, Garbage Trucks are Good Things

When you get to thinking about all the good things and bad things around, it gets right interesting.
The garbage truck is one of the best things I can think of. Aspirin is a real good thing. Paved roads, Sunday afternoons, a cola on ice, and finding your newspaper are all pretty good things.
Not finding your newspaper in your box after you have gone out in your bathrobe at daylight to get it is not a good thing. Everybody will agree that a sore thumb is not very good, either.
Loud radios, weddings, Macon Road in Columbus, and people who say “My God” all the time are on my list of bad things.
I think I’ll put down sevens with a line across the middle of them, too. It makes the 7 look like a backwards F. Whoever thought that up, anyway?

Garbage trucks rate high with me because until just a few years ago, no garbage trucks came to Pittsview. All we have to do now is put our garbage in a sack on the side of the road on Friday morning. It has gone – disappeared – by dinnertime.
I don’t know what they do with all that garbage, and I don’t want to know.
Before garbage trucks, you had to do something with it yourself. Finding a place to dump it was a problem. The food in the garbage was not so bad. Oh, it might smell bad, but at least the food would finally rot, or the ‘coons, possums, and ants would eat it up.
The tin cans, broken plates, and old light bulbs were harder to do something with. Styrofoam and plastic were the worst, though. I still find pieces of Styrofoam cups around the ditch where we dumped our trash.

Aspirin is on my list because it is good for anything from a sore toe to a headache. Aspirin is sort of like that joke about a thermos bottle….”How do it know?”

And paved roads! I was driving up a hill over near Nuckoll’s Crossing in the rain the other day. I remembered going up that long, slick hill with my daddy in the good old days.
He drove the car while I was out in the rain putting pine boughs under the wheels to get up that hill. The car would move up 2 or 3 feet, and I would grab that muddy pine limb and put it in front of the wheel again.
Over and over I had to do that until we got to the top of the hill. I would be so muddy by then that daddy did not want to let me back in the car, but he always did.

Sunday afternoons, especially in the spring and the fall, are really nice. If you have gone to church like you are supposed to do, and you’ve had a big dinner, that is all you’ve got to do for the rest of the day.
Since I don’t watch the stupid ball games, I usually just piddle around in the yard – not work, now – just piddle. I might wrestle with my dog awhile, sit in the yard swing and watch a hawk, or take a walk in the woods. Do nothing, really.
It is perfectly legitimate to just be lazy on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes I just think about garbage trucks.

(January 3, 1985, - the East Alabama Today section of the Ledger Enquirer)

Have a Lovely Day!

-Mug