Landfill: A Lesson in Situational Irony

August and early September of 2012 were killers, hot-flash humid. Even so, my brand new, back-alley cottage industry was growing way past my expections and my basement’s capacity. I was even getting brave enough to post finds on Facebook:

*  a 1920s silver wind-up gramophone

*  antique steamer trunks

And a few fails, too, like the busted beyond repair sofa that tempted me with its super-cute cover

 

Some friends told me to start a blog, already, and keep my catalogue off their gossip and trivia feed. Others jumped in and sent me on quests. The moment I'd see a friend’s text about a neighbor’s garage clean-up. I’d throw the kids in the van, which I called “God Bless America,” for the bumper stickers my Syrian-born mother patriotically stuck on front and back windshields immediately after 9/11.

One brain-crushingly hot September afternoon, my husband’s cousin messaged me on Facebook. Halfway across the county, she informed me, her neighbor’s beautifully maintained, solid oak kitchen set was sitting on the curb. I had sudden, gut-wrenching visions of the whole pile getting crushed and dumped into a landfill. I had a newly-converted eco zealot’s hatred of landfill. Also, kitchen sets sell fast on Craigslist, and I was eager to make another 80 bucks.

The skies were darkening. Weather forecasters put Westchester on tornado watch. The girls were suffering from the oppressive heat and taking it out on each other. No matter—get in God Bless America and go!

For the most part, Westchester freeways move traffic north or south. Makes sense, as New York City has most of the jobs. The two-lane east-west roads connecting most of our little villages wind around hills and across streams like the paved-over cattle paths that they are. To a Californian, Westchester traffic light patterns appear designed to hinder any driver’s chance to gain momentum while maximizing air pollution potential.

The intermittent, hammering rain further slowed our progress to about 15 miles per hour. I tried to make light, child-friendly conversation about how the sky was turning an ominous shade of green.

Suddenly, a few hundred feet ahead, on the opposite side of the road, a big feathery thing dropped out of a tree and stagger-flapped around. I slowed down to a crawl so the girls could get a good look.

“Wow!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Remember how Dad was explaining that a bird gets weak and just falls out of a tree when it’s ready to die…?” My voice was animated. It’s grisly, all right, but the girls really had asked him to explain how birds die, and—Mountain Man that he is—he told them all about it. Anyway, this dying bird, a hawk, was the most interesting thing that had happened that day.

Then, two things simultaneously happened that made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut and my eyes glued to the road:
1.  The bird got run over and crushed flat by an oncoming pickup truck. Oh, crap, they’re gonna cry, I thought.
2.  The driver in front of me—a Volvo wagon displaying a “Jon Stewart for President 2012” bumper sticker—screeched to a stop. To see the flattened hawk.

He skidded. I hydroplaned.

I clenched every sphincter in my body and twisted the wheel to the right. Fifty feet—twenty feet!—farther and everything would have been fine.

As it was, Gold Bless America slowly, relentlessly slid across the rain-saturated grassy shoulder and slammed to a stop. The air bags did not deploy, our crash was so slow.

The dead hawk was instantly forgotten, but, ohhhh, did the girls cry then. Thankfully, no humans were hurt in the accident.

God Bless America, my immaculate, 11 year old, 41,000 mile minivan—which, only four years earlier, we had bought from my mother at Blue Book value and shipped from California because we knew we’d never find its like again—had wedged itself between an estate’s stone wall on the right and two poles (electrical and speed limit) on the left.

As my adrenaline rush waned, I snickered at the political allegory embedded in God Bless America’s demise, and I snapped a photo.

That day, my insurance agent pronounced God Bless America “a total loss.” It would cost more to replace the damaged axle and wheels than to cut me a check for the van's Blue Book value.

In return, the insurance company took ownership of God Bless America, salvaged the good parts (seats, air bags, and—hah!—new brakes and tires) and shipped the crushed cube of its body to China to be melted into steel bars. The rest, they threw away.

Yes: I wanted to save a kitchen table from the landfill, but I put my minivan in it instead.

To a former English teacher, that is a fine example of situational irony. Let’s call it a day, shall we?

Copyright 2013, Tanya Monier

"The Runaway Mommy"

Today, I intended to write a brand new post about the ironies of upcycling, but life is getting in the way.

To buy some time, I hope to entertain you with a three-part non-fiction story I wrote last year for a blog called "Between Baby and Boomers." (Wanna see it? http://baby2boomersandwich.wordpress.com).

The site used the first part, but they thought the other two sections were too much Short Story, not enough Blog. I like things that way, so I'm going to share all three parts here.

Enjoy! Anyway, as I always tell the kids, "It's new to you."

"The Runaway Mommy"

1.

I’ve been able to avoid most of the heavy lifting in terms of my parents, who until recently had been aging gracefully in Sacramento, California, 3,000 miles away from me and my young family. My older sisters, both raising families in the Sacramento area, help my parents deal with any day-to-day needs.

I’ve felt bad and blessed about this fact until my mom fell down some stairs last October and complained to me (in mid-December) that her feet and lower legs had been heavy and numb ever since. The soonest I could see her was Christmas. By then, walking, bending, twisting, sitting, climbing stairs, standing, everything—except lying carefully in bed—had become an ordeal of pain.

“I thought I was going to throw up when I rolled all those grape leaves, so I sure hope your children like them.”

“Mom! Why would you torture yourself like that? We do not needgrape leaves!”

“Well, Honey, you know, I want the girls to know that their Tayta loves them.”

I growl. I can’t say that I know better than to get in to fights with my mom, since I try to follow a path of honesty. But now, I’m not angry at Mom, who will forever equate food with love. I want to destroy Kaiser Permanente.

Kaiser Permanente, in their quest to kill my parents, misdiagnosed an amelanomic sub-ungular melanoma embedded in my father’s fingernail for years. My father, minus one finger and all of his upper-body lymph nodes, was lucky to survive both the cancer and the treatment. My mother’s bleeding ulcers and hemorrhaging uterus were also misdiagnosed, causing severe blood loss and emergency transfusions in both cases.

Mom’s doctor finally ordered an MRI of my mom’s back and reported a +1cm shift in two vertebrae, L4 and L5. Her spinal cord was kinked, they noted. Solution (which they would not begin until after Christmas): 6 weeks of physical therapy. That therapy could paralyze her for good.

“You are kidding me, right? Mom, you cannot accept this!”

“Honey, I’m tired of fighting.”

I am not tired of fighting.

I left the kids with my husband to enjoy a day of Sacramento winter fun at Fairy Tale Town. I took my dad’s Lexus, now part of the front yard landscaping since no one will let him drive anymore, and went on my quest: to scream at the highest level Kaiser administrator I could locate. It was an all-day event.

I have been an 8^thgrade ELA teacher in a Bronx school where a 13 year old girl told me “Suck my tit, Bitch;” where I literally caught a desk from mid-air that a 16 year old 8^thgrader threw at boy for calling him “fag;” where the principal shrugged and said, “Well, you can’t pull the Titanic off the iceberg overnight, Sweetheart;”where I wore stack-heeled boots every day in the hopes that if I presented more than 6 feet of Arab-American womanhood to my students, they would stop running out the back door of my classroom to pull the fire alarm, again. I became a lion tamer at that job. My own mother regularly calls me scary, haughty, arrogant.

I need all those traits and all that training to break through Kaiser’s wall of lower-level administrators; honestly, they bring to life Ayn Rand’s wretched, slovenly bureaucrats. But you know what? I do break through. Because I have been a bullied kid, a self-centered pseudo-intellectual, a busy career woman—but now, I am a mother. Now, I know how to fight.

Frankly, I’m thrilled to have an opponent taller than 43 inches.

2.

The latch snapped as I eased the hotel door open. Instantly, my five and a half year old daughter sat straight up on the sofa bed.

“Mommy! Don’t go!” she sobbed. My four year old, wakened by her sister’s shouts at her ear, shot up crying, too.

“Nooooo! Don’t run away! We need you!” Their voices ricocheted into the sleeping hallway of the Silver Spring Residence Inn. I shut the door and sprang to their sides, felt their tears in the dark, hugged them.

“I need you, too. But Tayta is my mommy, and she had serious back surgery, Bunnies. She needs my help. Jiddo can’t do it. It’s a week; it’s just a week. Daddy and you will have fun driving back to New York, and you’ll be with your friends all week. It’s just a week. When you wake up Saturday morning, I’ll be back, and then we’ll have your birthday party.” Just filling the space with sound.

“Tanya, it’s 5:15. The shuttle’s waiting,” my husband murmured in my ear.

We kissed at the door, exchanged good luck wishes, and he returned to the wailing girls as the door snapped shut.

The shuttle driver loaded my small carry-on into the back of the van, but I climbed into the front passenger seat.

“I get car sick,” I half-smiled.

I relaxed into the vinyl seat, closed my eyes, and hoped for a nap while we picked up other passengers on the way to Dulles. Two minutes down the road, my right foot went numb, and I snapped to attention.

“We have to go back. I forgot something!”

At our Toyota Sienna—called “God Bless America” for the now-tattered bumper stickers my Syrian parents put on it in the days after 9/11—I pulled out two essential items: a full lumbar roll and a memory foam sciatic pillow made by a company called “Astar.” I call it “The Ass Star.”

Both pillows were critical to my identity, reminders that I should never again lift my sleeping 3 year old….Yeah, I snickered knowingly to myself, But I’m sure I'm going to try to lift my 75 year-old mother.

As I settled onto my pillows next to the driver, I actually guffawed, “Hah hah! I wouldn’t even make it to the airport without these. Ok, let’s go!”

3.

Silver Spring to Dulles, Dulles to Chicago, Chicago to Sacramento. I shoot through security; sleep through both flights and speak to no one. I am a raging extrovert, so it's possible this is the most secret sign of the Apocalypse. I walk straight from my seat to my middle sister’s Lexus SUV, idling at passenger pickup. I roll my small carry-on bag behind me, indulgently thinking, Ahhh, the benefits of traveling alone!

My sister looks genuinely happy to see me, a fact that shouldn’t surprise me but does. Out of a personal principle I suspect is related to long-seated resentment of my place as the family’s spoiled baby and (possibly worse) as a“bleeding heart liberal,” she does not generally give me compliments or praise. But now, she hugs me and exclaims, “Thank you so much for this. Seriously, we could not do this without you.”

She asks about the kids, my husband, yesterday’s Arlington funeral service for my husband’s uncle, a full colonel who fought in World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam. We should all live and die so well to be so honored in our death, I think.

 

I ask about Dad: he was a classic Type A personality, but his physical health and his mental acuity are slipping steadily.

At my childhood home again, I get big hugs and kisses from Dad (who seems an inch shorter than at Christmas) take a quick shower, and put on a fresh shirt that I hope will camouflage my growing belly. No: it’s not a baby. Or...well...it's a Food Baby. I've been eating too much and exercising too little, two facts that are crimes in my mom’s eyes.

I hate the smell of institutional almond-scented soap. The place seems quiet, but my head is buzzing.

            My father walks into the private room first: “Hi, Honey. Your baby is here.”

My sister steps in.

 

“Ahhh. Hi, Baby,” Mom smiles weakly, then spots me towering over my sister’s shoulder.

“Oh! My littlest baby!” Her eyes light up.

 

My heart pounds: Mommy.

She does not look good. Mom’s normally smooth olive-and-ivory complexion sweats gray-and-yellow under the fluorescent lights. Her eyes do not look good, either. She’s feverish, I know, even before I touch her. My little ones have the same look when a virus makes them suffer.

I angle my body over the bed rail and lean in to kiss Mom’s forehead. My new underwire bra audibly creaks--I'm that heavy. I pray she does not notice.

At once, I feel two strong hands grab my belly. Startled, I glance down. My camouflage failed. The shirt tucked itself in to my waistband as I leaned over. And since I’m bending towards the left, the right side of my belly is bulging.

“What is this?” Mom demands harshly.

I brace myself. Last time she saw me this heavy, she relentlessly drove home how extra pounds always make me look "mammoth" and "really unattractive."

“Honey, what is this? Is your liver swollen?”

I laugh, relieved. She might be feverish. She might be high on Percocet. But she is still Mom.


Copyright 2012, Tanya Monier

Things That Are Not Compostable

Last time, I mentioned that I have come to think that Westchester folk are trying to be generous when they curb their perfectly good furniture, kids toys, and other cast-offs that originally "cost a pretty penny," as my Depression Era dad would say.

"Hey there!" these neighbors seem to shout. "This thing is totally great—and it can be yours for FREE! Just get it out of here....Now." Sometimes, they tape similarly worded paper signs to carefully disassembled bookcases and bed frames, baggies of bolts and screws duct-taped underneath so as not to mar the finish.

An “Everybody Wins” situation: great, right? The thing is, I've found that Westchester folks rarely use craigslist, freecycle, or any other social media to share that this deal is lurking in the dark, in a cul-de-sac not five minutes from your home.

So, people who could use that extra jogger, pair of dining chairs, or reading lamp have no clue and miss the deal. Or, they are too something (busy? embarrassed? overloaded with stuff already?) to stop if they drive past and see it.

I’m not an upcycling saint. I still rush home in the rain after a tutoring session, thinking, "I sure hope someone picks up that white velvet salon chair before it soaks and rots." A decade ago, my metal frame futon and mattress—my first grad school purchase and a killer deal in 1995 at $220 for delivery and assembly—made a horrifying metal-on-metal scream when folded by the garbage truck compactor. Just moved out of NYC (where curb shopping is a citizen's right and duty) I never thought that no one would pick this beauty off the curb.

Big stuff does frequently get grabbed by someone. I'm not alone out there, though I'm probably the only one doing this in business casual clothes and a white minivan. There are categories of items, however, that I never see picked up:

* TVs (both tube and flat screen), VCRs, DVD players, stereo equipment

* Golf clubs, bags, and shoes

* Framed art and unused/sealed poster frames

* Beach chairs and umbrellas

* Skis and all manner of ski equipment: boots, hats, poles, goggles, and crutches.
 
Weirdly, this “garbage” is often put out with the lawn clippings on a Sunday night (one of the quirks of Westchester County’s pick-up days, which vary from neighborhood to neighborhood). Lots of times, they are half-hidden by paper bags and leaf piles. Only a flash of reflected headlight will catch my attention as I drive.

Atop a “compost pile,” I once found a mahogany jewelry box that contained 16k gold heart pendants, sterling silver necklaces, and Chanel sunglasses. (A student dubbed that cache “The Heartbreak” –and yeah, I sold The Heartbreak.)  Last summer, I found a number of religious icons in just one week. I even made a Facebook album called “Jesuses I Have Saved from the Trash.”



I do what I can. For example, I left the trio of Jesuses on the steps of a local Catholic church late at night (to be found like orphans the following morning by the kindly priest…?). I even started grabbing skis and golf clubs just to appease my conscience. (To be clear: I know nothing—and care nothing—about skiing or golf.) But, there's an endless supply in Westchester, it seems. My back patio and basement now look like an out-of-date sporting goods store.

And, of course, beach chair season has come again….

Copyright 2013, Tanya Monier

After a year, I cave and make a blog about my observations as an Upcycler

If I am ever going to get arrested for this--because I haven't bothered to find out if "curb shopping" or "garbage picking" is illegal in Westchester--it's because I stay too long at every pick up.

I am too lazy to take down the kids' booster seats or organize the car in any sort of methodical fashion. Big sand digging toys are the night's first find? Welcome! And there they stay, under whatever follows; by the end of a run, huge Morrocan pillows sit atop folding chairs, which teeter on a reading lamp, which is thrust between the armrests of a folding double jogger. And then I can't shut the door, so I stand there--all six feet of sweating, stout Arab-American mama--muttering and snarling and pushing with all my might.

I have my line ready for the police officer: "But, Sir, I am turning Trash into Culture."

And it's true. It's like Fight Club, without the split personalities. I fix up and sell the cast-off "fat" of the Lower Hudson Valley back to itself, mainly through craigslist and yard sales. Sales from last June to this April funded a 16 day springtime trip for my family of four to Europe. Not bad.

If, as studies I hear on NPR pronounce, the United States is the most wasteful--and the most generous--country on earth, then Westchester, New York, is the most "American" of its counties.

When I meet up with folks who are putting things on the curb, I ask them, "What about Goodwill? What about calling The Salvation Army?"

The most common answer I get is, "Oh, I just can't be bothered." It's infuriating.

Still, after a year of picking and selling, I think there is actually an intended gesture of generosity involved in carefully displaying a leather dining room set, or a pair of Kettler tricycles, or a king-sized bed frame on the curb. It's a little like I'm a lobster who is grateful for the crap on the ocean's floor. But what else can I say? There's some damn good pickins in this corner of the ocean.


Copyright 2013, Tanya Monier