El­sa Wrench

Just as the sun now rais­ing up and the cow now wak­ing up, the garbage truck used to pass through the 'hood.

Then its ar­rival be­came er­rat­ic–some days it would groan down the street as ear­ly as three in the morn­ing.

Oth­er days it would just not show up. It is a mat­ter of strat­e­gy, tim­ing and sheer dumb luck to catch the vis­it of the garbage truck. My morn­ings are a game of catch as catch can.

Man of the House, like any prop­er su­per­hero, de­clared garbage dis­pos­al his chore.

He would set the alarm; place his slip­pers in the cor­rect strate­gic po­si­tion to fa­cil­i­tate a mad dash for the back door; leave the light on in the cor­ri­dor; lo­cate the pre-pack­aged garbage out­side the back door; and go to sleep re­mind­ing his brain to wake him up in time for Garbage Day.

I would watch, be­cause I have to get my en­ter­tain­ment some­how.

This is what would hap­pen:

RRRI­I­I­INGG! Alarm goes off like hells's bells.

Man of the House sucks teeth loud­ly and goes back to sleep.

The rat­tle and roll of the garbage truck gets clos­er.

Man of the House leaps to feet. "Oh gosh, the garbage truck!''

Man of the House runs, stum­bles, runs out of the yard, while tot­ing two bulging black plas­tic bags and prac­tis­es his best Slin­ga Ma­lin­ga im­i­ta­tion by bowl­ing bags in­to the back of the flee­ing truck.

On less suc­cess­ful morn­ings, the garbage re­mains, the at­mos­phere has flies and noth­ing can't break them up. Plan B in­volves (a) freez­ing the garbage (b) when the freez­er is full, load­ing the pick-up with garbage bags; and (c) dri­ving around at night look­ing for avail­able pub­lic dump­sters.

That worked for a while, but then I start­ed hav­ing bad dreams of be­ing caught on CCTV and ar­rest­ed by po­lice on sus­pi­cion of toss­ing some­thing gris­ly and il­le­gal which they found in the dump­ster.

Plan B, sub­sec­tion (1) is called Re­duce and Run.

Garbage is por­tioned off every oth­er day in­to mi­ni gro­cery bags which are sur­rep­ti­tious­ly de­posit­ed in pub­lic re­cep­ta­cles in malls and fast-food places.

Nope, we just can't leave the garbage bags at our kerb and wait for pick-up.

The truck does not en­ter my street be­cause it is a pri­vate one, which sounds as if I live some­where posh, but no, I am just like you, wait­ing for the lot­tery fairy to vis­it. We can't leave the bags at the main road be­cause the stray dogs would knock over the bin, tear the bags to bits and scat­ter my life through the area. Do my neigh­bours re­al­ly need to know I eat tinned corned beef and pre­fer Nice & Easy nat­ur­al dark­est brown?

Nope, I can't in­stall a dog-proof con­tain­er at the cor­ner, be­cause my neigh­bours have al­ready com­man­deered the avail­able patch­es of con­crete on the main road suit­able for that pur­pose.

En­vi­ron­men­tal­ists tell me I should re­cy­cle and re-use more to re­duce the amount of throw­away stuff. I can man­age a com­post heap for the kitchen gar­den and a col­lec­tion of plas­tic con­tain­ers for the hy­dro­pon­ics project of 2013.

I draw the line at cro­chet­ing lit­tle dress­es for plas­tic bot­tles and card­board box­es to be re-in­vent­ed as toi­let-pa­per hold­ers and ug­ly or­na­ments.

So, yes, I stalk the garbage man.

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