The Perfect Song Blog

Saturday, April 26, 2008

After breakfast I gather up the garbage and the recyclable stuff. The three dogs jump in the Jeep. I toss in the garbage and my flat garden tractor tire. The first stop is the bank to cash a check. I don’t use cash much anymore but it’s good to have.

It’s a breezy sunny day in the 70s – not April weather. I pull into the transfer station. There’s a line of cars down the road though there are none up by the bins. Finally I see that there is one car at the top of the drive with two really slow middle aged people pulling out their recyclable stuff. They’ve parked right in the middle of the drive so no one can get around them.

No one honks. They’re too polite. . . When the car finally moves, we all pull up to the unloading area. Frank, the man in the trailer who sells the garbage bags, smiles, “How ya doin’?” I say fine, great weather. He nods. “My apple blossoms are out already. I hope we don’t get a frost.” I say we could. “Oh, yeah, about every two years that happens. “

I backtrack to Christianson Tire and leave my tire and inner tube. The nice young man at the desk says he’ll do it himself. Outside, I find myself thinking about the coming week. On Monday I attend to the burial of my younger brother, Rick. He was too young to die but did and left an empty space in a lot of hearts.

Someday, when I can, I’ll write more about him, his life.

I ‘m in Christianson’s parking lot looking across Rt. 86 at the complex composed of department stores, Circuit City, a pet store and a Wal-Mart super center. The land used to hold the world’s largest A&P plant but it went bust in the early ’80 and sat vacant for a quarter of a century.

I’m surveying the retail complex and realize I’m looking at exactly what’s wrong in the country. Places where we produced things then exported them are now gone and replaced with stores that sell things they’ve imported.

Wednesday I’m scheduled to have a broken molar capped. It will involve numbing and drilling with my head bent back for an hour. My dentist is involved in reviving a small, family amusement park and he’ll talk about the Coast Guard test he has to pass to navigate a dragon boat in the park pond.

I head over to Lowe’s where I pick up seed beds, garden gloves for Leigh, and poison to kill the tent caterpillars that ravage our weeping cherries each year.

I run into Audrey who used to work for me in the 1980s when we had word processing staff. She retired a long time ago but I was still surprised when she said she’d be 81 next week. “The thing that bothers me the most is being treated differently because I’m old,” she said. “Hey, I have a computer. I have a cell phone. I text message. . . .”

I go back to Christianson’s. The nice young man has my tire. “The other one was bad,” he said. “I put the new one in. I don’t know if it was defective or I punctured it so I put one of ours In and I ain’t gonna charge you for it.”

“Thanks. So you sell inner tubes here?”

“Yeah.”

I felt a little foolish for bringing in a tube from a farm supply store down the road.