Masks the creeps among us discard
What is it about old people and trash?
We’re against it. Rather strongly. Solving the litter problem by simply picking it up feels like a little victory over all that is wrong in this world.
As I have mentioned in this space before, my sister and I spent our summers growing up in the 1960s with our grandmother Hazel O’Brien Oliver at her mother’s cabin in the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. It’s an endearing place, with a muddy creek filled with perch and snapping turtles and the odd water moccasin and a swimming pool and nothing else but trails between the small residences.
Grandmother hated litter, and would pick it up. Alicia and I were indifferent to it, or at least not obsessed with it. We just thought it was a hoot to game her while we walked along, say, the Spring Trail, which leads to a little shack into which water bubbles up from the earth and where a century ago, pre-Frigidaires, the locals kept their butter and milk cool if not cold against the Texas heat. As we strolled, I would casually toss an empty plastic chip bag or a gum wrapper into the weeds alongside the trail.
“Oh, precious,” Grandmother would say with a very sad face, bending down to pick it up as we giggled. Such brats!
I’m the same age now as she was then, and she would be enormously pleased to know I have inherited her hobby. As I have also said, I’m going to spend my own golden years, which begin in about five minutes, toodling around the Venetian Grand Canal and its side
in a foot-pedal-powered kayak, scooping up the scourge that is plastic bags in the water with a pick-up stick.
Or maybe it will be the canals of Venice, Ca. if that big newspaper pension doesn’t actually pay out. Wherever. The bags are in every body of water on Earth.
I practice for that retirement by picking up trash every morning at the overnight Lover’s Lane at the beginning of my running trail in the Arroyo Seco. Though the city provides a litter barrel a few paces from where the Lotharios park their rides, it goes unused. So it remains for me at dawn to place the plastic bag the newspaper comes in over my hand and bend down to pick up empty Modelo cans, Philly Blunt wrappers, cigarette butts, airplane booze bottles and, well, the entirely unmentionable.
And, for a year now, the weirdest new addition to the litter universe: medical masks. The other stuff, I guess I can understand. And a fellow, while making time, would want to remove his pandemic-wear. But he’s gonna need it later! He can’t walk into the 7-Eleven for another six-pack without it! Why discard it?
While neighborhood-walking during this plague year, you, too have seen discarded masks — your standard sky-blues, your black stretchies, even your fancy N95s — on sidewalks and curb strips all over Southern California. I have discussed this with others, and it’s a head-scratcher for all. The city Public Works guy thanking me for picking up the trash he was going to pick up: “I don’t know, man. They just going to want one after they done, right?” Right. A friend suggests it’s a function of there being tens of millions of masks among us whereas there were none a year ago, so naturally some end up tossed by the wayside. But there sure are a lot of them. Perhaps it’s a littering protest movement by these crackpots who imagine they know better than the docs do and pretend to believe maskwearing to keep us all safe is a vast Nanny State government conspiracy rather than a simple, effective way to stop the spread of disease. Meanwhile, I live to serve, and will just go on picking up what the various kinds of creeps, political or not, discard.