2001-03-29 - 11:59 p.m.

Garbage Pickers

Today is the day that my chess column is due, and I was up early working on it, sitting at my desk. I heard some people talking loudly out in the street, so I wandered over to the bay window to see what the noise was about and saw a rather depressing tableau.

Two elderly people were going through the garbage of the house across the street. Today is also garbage day.

I have kind of mixed feelings about people going through my trash. The initial thought is: "Hey! Don't touch my stuff!" But if I did actually say that, they'd be perfectly within their rights to say: "Hey yourself! You threw it out!"

Basically, as long as they don’t make a mess I don't care what they do.

Driving around Frown Town the usual sort of trash pickers I occasionally see are spooky homeless-looking guys pushing around shopping carts full of junk, stopping at every house looking for new treasures. The two old people seemed to have actually come in a car - a brown sedan that they kept returning to like two bedraggled birds coming back to their nest with twigs and scraps.

At my old apartment, where I lived before the Hamster Palace was renovated, there was a major-league garbage picker who used to go through our stuff late at night. Since I usually put my trash out at ungodly hours, I'd occasionally see him. He drove a big blue sedan that he'd fitted with one of those search lights like they have on police cars, all the better to see the garbage he was picking through. He seemed to be looking for usable stuff of any kind and I always had a feeling that what was trash last night was going to be in an antique store tomorrow with a $12.95 price tag on in.

However, someone driving up with a car to pick through the garbage in broad daylight, this I hadn't seen before.

The two old garbage pickers seemed to be in terrible shape - they seemed to hobble more than walk. Also, I wasn't sure if I should call them "old" they could have easily been in their mid-50s, only about 15 years older than me.

The old man walked across the street to look at my garbage. He gave the bag a couple of desultory pokes, and the waddled back to the other side. Obviously my garbage didn't seem worth the trouble of going through.

What were they looking for, I wondered.

My question was answered when they hit the garbage bags in front of the small house across the street. Inside one bag they found a motherlode of deposit bottles. Jackpot! The old man staggered back to the car and got a blue Wal-Mart bag to fill up with the newly-found swag.

Well, I don't really like the people in that house much anyway, and now I know that they throw out deposit bottles.

The old people spent a good fifteen minutes carefully picking the bottles and cans out of the garbage bag and transferring them to the blue Wal-Mart bag. When they finally staggered away, I would estimate they had a little less than a dollar's worth of cans. And judging by the way they kept wiping their hand on their jackets, they also had very sticky hands. After all, why rinse out the bottles if you are going to throw them out?

They checked out the rest of the trash heaps on the block but found no more deposit bottles. Shortly after that, they painfully clambered into their car and drove away.

I was thinking that it was pretty sad if you are reduced to picking through people's trash for deposit bottles in your sunset years. It also seemed like a not terribly cost-conscious way to live, spending all that time going through sticky, smelly bags of garbage in order to find ninety cents worth of deposit bottles, not even enough to pay for a the gas they used to get here.