One Man's Trash

I didn’t know we were poor growing up. My mom was a teacher and my dad worked at a steel mill. We never went without, we just didn’t have extra luxuries. Rice was a staple food, and there was always plenty of it. Powdered milk was normal, and my dad’s Hawaiian fried pancakes were our special treat. We had a big house with a nice yard, and I didn’t think anything much of the bar on the corner or the fact that we lived in the barrio of Houston, Northside.

Saturday mornings were always special. My dad would wake us up at the crack of dawn with the smell of pancakes frying and bacon popping in the skillet. He wrap up some rice balls, put them in a bag and off we’d go. He’d take us walking into downtown, picking up aluminum cans the whole way. We’d explore abandoned buildings and old delapitated houses. We went rummaging through the miscellaneous array of trash, lifting up old floorboards, and scavenging for old bottles which my dad collected. This was fun, this was time with my dad spent exploring while we let my mom sleep in. This is one of the things I remember most fondly from my childhood.

Later, after crushing the cans and taking them to recycle, my dad would treat us to a candy or soda from the store and we’d head home. We would gently hand my dad our new found treasures. He would carefully wash and clean them, and once they were dry he would find a space for them amongst their kind, and there he would relate their story to us. Some were old medicine bottles, or spirits bottles, and still others were from up high off telephone poles. It was my favorite room in the house, my dad’s bottle room. In the morning when the first beams of sunlight shone through, stepping into that room was like stepping into a pastel rainbow of blue, green, and pink hues.

This was how our Saturdays were spent growing up. It was walking to downtown, or repelling off a cliff in the park near the bayou to dig out whatever was glinting in the sunshine. It was stories of far off adventures, and singing songs that my dad would sing to us. It was syrup covered pancakes, and mud caked shoes. It was picking chili peppers off the plants and squirreling away our allowance in our chewing tobacco tins. It was innocence. It was perfect.