As trash day rolls around - Sarasota Herald-Tribune

I watch my grandson, nearly 1 year old, lose it over gravity. The outrage! The insult! The heartbreak!

But tantrums are for the young, as are mass shootings, pyromania and road rage.

We older people write our representatives in Congress. We vote. You rarely hear us ranting as we creep out to the curb, clutching our bathrobes closed, toting another small bag of trash to add to the bin. We should get more credit for our decorum.

As we face another new year, we know we will watch a new crop of foolish people gain admiration. Some will be merely ridiculous; others will be horrifying.

We know that, in the new year, people we care about will suffer and die. Each of them will take a bit more of our past with them. Things do not reverse.

In the infusion room where bags of chemical hope drip steadily through ports and needles into our bodies and the bodies of our friends, we sit politely, murmur gratefully.

When our bodies won't take us where we want to go, we change plans. We sit quietly.

We don't grow old alone; our favorite poetry and paintings age beside us. We listen to a favorite singer sing a song we listened to lifetimes ago. The same lyrics now tell a different story than we once heard. We wonder how different she feels singing it now.

We have witnessed the repetition of patterns for so long we can't help but recognize and predict. Even if our attention were elsewhere, we couldn't have missed so many cycles, couldn't have failed to absorb the knowledge that this, eventually, always follows that.

The young insist it's different this time. They have reasons, specifics. Facts. Urgency. Will.

We did too.

Things look different from here. We recognize the beauty of simple cycles: clothes flowing from drawer to body to laundry and back, for example.

And at no earlier time in our lives could Garbage Eve and Garbage Day have taken on such significance. Accumulating trash over the week requires multiple decisions. Does this tattered rag have another wash in it? Are we ready to admit we're never going to fix the latch on this box, finish this article, this crossword puzzle, this lipstick? Do we still believe this plant will revive?

Dragging the bins to the curb marks serious intent. Adjustments can be made, but eventually the insatiable trucks come, growling and wheezing, to render our decisions irrevocable. With their passing, we are absolved of any further involvement with what has been taken. Purged, we begin the future lighter, free.

There was a time when we too would have found the sanctifying rituals of Garbage Day as absurd as any religious rite. But we're less judgy now.

The seasons change quickly, having abandoned their once leisurely pace. Whether we are here to see it or not, we know life will surge up take its turn. It will do its best.

And soon it too will be surprised by winter, having believed it would take much longer to grow old.

Amy Goldman Koss, a contributing writer to Los Angeles Times Opinion, is the author of numerous books for children and young adults.

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"Trash" - Google News
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As trash day rolls around - Sarasota Herald-Tribune
"Trash" - Google News
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