The Voyeurism of Trash Day

My sister called me yesterday evening and read aloud a snippet of our assigned beach novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. (For those of you wondering, neither of these practices - assigning a beach novel or reading aloud over the telephone - is considered unusual behavior in our family. Let it go and move on... )

Here is what she read, the words of a character I have yet to meet, Juliet: "I don't consider myself a real peeper - they go in for bedrooms, but it's families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me. I can imagine their entire lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or lit candles, or bright sofa cushions" (Shaffer and Barrows 14).

Don't you just love that? So evocative, it immediately brought to mind several other intimate scenes. Remember at the end of The Great Gatsby when Nick watches Daisy and Tom eating cold chicken and drinking beer, trying to regain some control, some sense of equilibrium in their desperately shallow lives? Or in Angela's Ashes when young Frankie runs through the nighttime streets, desperate to find lemonade for his sick mother? Remember how he ran through the streets, past the homes of those who lived in relative luxury compared to his own dismal circumstances? The yellow light poured out of the windows, illuminating the charmed lives within: Ach, aye, poor Frankie! Or in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, (the movie), how the director Richard Brooks shot so many of the scenes from the wide veranda, through the great shuttered doors and into the true ugliness that lay at the family's core? Oh, what a window reveals!

I was reminded of this idea - intimate revelation - again this morning. In many of the neighborhoods through which I ran, it was Trash Day. Moving along at my stately pace amid city-approved receptacles and recycling containers, boxes and bags and other makeshift containers, I found myself privy to the details of strangers' lives. I didn't have to creep up a lawn or tiptoe through a dark alley to know what was going on within these homes: their trash made clear the stories of their lives.

Take age and station of life, for example: rites of passage litter the sidewalks - the "It's a Boy!" stork once displayed in the lawn now finds itself head first in the dumpster. Tiny newborn diaper boxes give way to bulkier "crawlers" and "walkers", baby formula gives way to nuggets, convenience foods, and fast-food sacks.

It is simply amazing how much trash growing families generate, especially in contrast to the single and empty-nesters; their status is made obvious by their unusually small amounts of refuse. A single plastic grocery bag with handles tied together sits lonely at the edge of their drives.

You don't need to rifle through someone's refuse for an old bank statement to know how some people spend their money, saving a few cents by buying Beer-30 or Natural Light instead of a more costly brand.; others, though, still have room for luxury items like a new electric toothbrush. You learn who acts on impulse or is lured in by fads; the Shamwow box and empty Acai juice bottles proudly poking their heads out of overstuffed cans. Some people buy generic cranberry juice; others still pay more for Ocean's Spray. You know who has a cat, dog, ferret; you remember that the charm of a fish tank quickly gives way to stink and noise.

Who is timely and who the procrastinator? Next to Ned Neatnick's line of carefully secured bags is his neighbor's long-forgotten Christmas tree, hidden behind the tool shed and finally dragged to the curve in late June.

Do these innocents realize what they leave open to the public eye? Do they know that someone is scrutinizing the remains of their day, creating something out of seemingly nothing? Maybe I'm making too much out of the trash -- taking recycling to a ridiculous new height. Maybe, looking back, all of the examples of windows that I gave earlier in this post were just fiction, that all that was revealed was the writer's own sense of fiction and fantasy. Maybe that's all that was reflected here, but I doubt it. Life has a funny way of making itself clear...