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Monday, February 14, 2005
Scenery
Perhaps somewhere in the world someone has a more wretched, dreary, disgraceful view from their living room sofa, but I doubt it.
Looking out the window here is what I see... directly across the street, an old man has parked his astonishingly decrepit pick-up truck. The abandoned red brick house beyond him has all kinds of dreck sitting on porch and lawn. The old man is toiling arthritically about picking up this and that and adding some of what he finds to the already towering, tottering pile of junk on the back of the truck. Once in a while he performs a sorting maneuver by which I mean he pulls things off the truck and throws them into the gutter. He has smashed a number of glass items there. To the smashed glass he added several strips of metal and some empty cans. Sure is going to be a dangerous place to park a car when he gets finished. Hard on the tires. This old man is one of the dreary items on the landscape.
Moving along, I come to the yellow apartments. beside them stands a double row of trash receptacles. The blue ones are strictly for recyclables. It is completely totally forbidden to put plastic bags, food waste, dirty diapers, etc into the recycle tubs. Oh well. The first three containers over there are blue ones and they are stuffed to overflowing with no-no's. The lids won't close and trash is all over the ground. Garbage pickup is four days away. Beyond those three overstuffed containers stand thirteen empty containers.
These trash holders are probably 10 feet from the front door of the first yellow apartment building. Standing in that always open doorway is a fat drunk. He is throwing up. What comes out is red. Must be wine. Once in a while he leans over enough to get the throw-up away from his clothes and onto the sidewalk. Sometimes he just stays up straight and lets the vomit stream down his front. Fortunately rain is coming down in buckets so if he stays there long enough, Mother Nature may kind of hose him off.
Moving along the front of that building, we come to the corner where wires from the electric pole run over to the meter box. Someone tied together the strings of a pair of sneakers and tossed them over this electric line. That bit of urban whimsy has been here at least as long as I have. Since the electric line comes across from my side of the street, those shoes have hung over one lane of traffic all last fall and winter.
Now we come to the front of the second yellow brick apartment building. Spread around on the sidewalk are several old, rotten sofas plus some other housekeeping items. No one has called for special garbage pickup so those things have sat there for quite a while. They're already finding a purpose. Last evening a group of loungers sat there watching as a man pulled along curbside in a falling apart car, got out, took a bald tire out of the other side of the front seat...and with a length of frayed rope tied the tire to the front of his car, running the rope through holes in the hood and the grill. Since he only tied the tire at the top, the bottom of it thumped around as he drove away. Those sofasitters, comfortable on the sidewalk, were loudly amused.
OK, so that's the view from my front window today. As I sat with my breakfast coffee, here came little groups of school children through the rain, past all the trash, past smashed glass and metal, right by the vomitting wino, the old junk stealer, and all the dingbat furniture.
Across the street from all that, at the foot of the porch steps I can see my containers of blue and white pansies. They look very nice, but are a small counterbalance to everything else.
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