[Daily Journal, Franklin, 2001]
I don’t know your name, although I might be able to find it out. I got a good look at your car. But I prefer to think of you as “Order 381, Register 3, Franklin Taco Bell, 5:27 p.m., 5/04/01.”
You drove past my house on Walnut Street a few minutes after that. As you passed, you extended your hand from the car window and flicked a little plastic baggie into the middle of the street.
I was on the front porch, waiting to go out to supper myself, and I got to wondering what gift you had left for me and my neighbors. Kittens, I thought for an instant, but happily it was only taco trash. I walked over and picked up the baggie, surprising a motorist not used to seeing a man in a suit out trash-picking on a lovely Friday afternoon.
I’m not sure why your casually bestowed trash interested me so much. I’m used to finding pop cans, beer bottles, and fast-food litter on my lawn. But those are impersonal. They just show up, like crocuses in spring. But I saw your very human hand, and the graceful arc it gave the baggie, like Jalen Rose sinking a 10-footer.
Inside the baggie, I found the receipt for your snack. It told me you had eaten “2 B-BFSP” at a cost of $3.38, “1 Mild” at no charge, and “1 PEP-32” for $1.29. With the 24-cent tax, the bill came to $4.91 at the Drive-Thru window. “Thank you for eating at Taco Bell,” the receipt said.
“And thank you for throwing your trash on my street,” I said.
But now my journalist’s curiosity was piqued, and I wondered what else I could find out about you from your trash. You know how we journalists are. I carried your baggie to my garage and went through it, piece by messy piece. (Hope you don’t have any loathesome skin diseases, Slobo, or you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.)
Your meal turned out to have been two Fiesta Burritos with Mild Border Sauce. You used one packet of sauce; your companion used two. Or maybe it was the other way around. You left some sauce on the wrappers and a couple of wadded-up napkins, which I unfolded carefully. It made me feel very close to you, Pathetic Slob, almost intimate.
But the most interesting things in the baggie were what you didn’t consume or soil—ll unopened packets of Mild Border Sauce, weighing 3cwt each and containing water, tomato paste, vinegar, spices, salt, xanthan gum, one-tenth of 1 percent sodium benzoate (as a preservative), and natural flavoring. “Packaged exclusively for Taco Bell Corp., Irvine, Calif.”
Eleven packets. But why not, since they were free? The preservative wasn’t all that necessary, since you decided in the four blocks between Taco Bell and my house to chuck them into the street.
There were also a couple of unused napkins.
I washed my hands very thoroughly.
A story in the morning paper says Earth is losing its “scrubbers.” The tiny hydroxl radicals that have destroyed atmospheric pollution for millennia are slowly declining in number. The planet’s fragile atmosphere is undergoing profound change, the story says, and may have crossed a threshold that threatens its self-cleansing ability.
But why should that surprise us? We are dirty creatures, who dump and discard and foul the beautiful blue planet on which our children and children’s children might have lived in health and happiness for all time. We foul the world, but the world begins on Walnut Street.
It begins with me, too. We are partners, Pathetic Slob. Too many plastic baggies, too many soiled napkins, too much Mild Border Sauce. I don’t throw it in the street the way you do, because I had a mother who taught me better. But it piles up, it piles up.
Do you know about the Nut Room? It’s a theoretical problem in which a room is filled with nuts in their shells. You are allowed to eat them all, but you have to leave the shells in the room. The joker is that you can’t eat them all, because a time comes when you can no longer find the nut meats among the shells.
That’s the kind of Nut World we’re creating. Think about it your next time in the Drive-Thru. I’ll think about it, too—and about you, Pathetic Slob, my brother, sister, friend.
