the garbageman

The air is crisp, the sun is brilliant, the newspaper is thinner than a Dickensian waif, and I seem to be sick enough to consider a trip to the doctor.

Soon enough, the garbageman will come to pick up recent accumulations and leave buckets and barrels emptied and awaiting ... new accumulations.

It's not the plump and red-cheeked newspaper itself that I miss especially but rather the part it plays in some imagined environment of my life. Once it provided a shared thread as others too picked it up off the front stoop and carried it to where a cup of coffee might accompany its bits of information. A slower time, I suppose, but the slowness carried a potential for seriousness that speed cannot... and that's much the same that pioneers might suggest of my own imaginary times.

Shuffling around in tattered socks, grumbling about times past ... I can live with it and yet wonder mildly what similar reminiscence my children will have. Will they look back on a time when the big and blowsy Internet coursed through their veins? Will they remember the fateful day when the electricity went off and ...?

Will the garbageman ever run out of business? I doubt it.

It's just what the doctor ordered.