'Objects of Value or Virtue'

The only summer mornings we woke up and got dressed early was garbage collection day. We had to beat the trash men. This was long before recycling came into fashion. Everything went into the fluted metal trash cans. Larger objects were piled beside them. Once we found an oversized television set which we carried away in a wagon, hauled deep into the woods, lugged across the creek and up the hill and threw off a cliff for the pure delight of hearing a cathode ray tube explode. I marvel that some of that glass, metal and plastic are probably still in that creek bed after sixty years.

We claimed old magazines and assorted bric-à-brac. At the time – early-to-mid-sixties – I was reading my way through the collected oeuvre of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Once I found a machete-length butcher knife with a wooden handle. I painted the blade red and proudly carried my John Carter of Mars sword. I suspect kids today would be admonished not to do any of the things I’ve just described, though we were practicing our own version of recycling. Howard Nemerov precedes his poem “The Town Dump” with lines from Act III, Scene 2 of King Lear. Lear is on the heath during a storm. Kent leads him to a hovel for shelter and Lear says “The art of our necessities is strange, / That can make vile things precious.” That’s a nice gloss on our hobby as kids. Nemerov goes on to describe our weekly summer pastime:

 

“Objects of value or virtue,

However, are also to be picked up here,

Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat,

Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels

No one will skid on, apple cores that caused

Neither the fall of man nor a theory

Of gravitation. People do throw out

The family pearls by accident, sometimes,

Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques

To prowl this place by night, with flashlights . . .”