What is it that makes us remember so fondly? Because we were children in our memories? Because we still are somewhere inside and want to reach down, grab ahold of that, and be children again? Or, just because they were such fond times? Ahhhh, well----for some questions, there really are not answers. Not yet. Be patient, then, and remember.

We Used To Take The Garbage Out On Saturday

It was good when I was a kid.

I used to wake up on Saturday mornings all kid-sleepy, slip some played-in-the-day-before-clothes on, and carelessly invade the kitchen, where the early summer sunlight shone brilliantly through the windows in shafts colored from the yellow-flowered drapes. Hands in pockets, head tilted first to one side, then the other, blonde hair tossled, I would bravely emerge to challenge the day.

I remember that Mom would be there in the early morning, already working, making kitchen sounds. Washing brilliant yellow and blue dishes in the porcelain sink by the window that framed a view out over the deep green, shaded summer back yard. Standing by the white General Electric stove near the opposite wall and stirring in many sized pans things which smelled of my wildest young-kid dreams. Sweeping, making faint hissing noises across the swirled red and white linoleum kitchen floor, gathering the morning's debris into a yellow metal dust pan that gave a soft clank as it met the floor. To a kid, things are in order when he sees his seemingly ageless Mother busy in the kitchen early on a Saturday morning, gently into the summer.

Well, Saturday made it a weekend, of course, but it was also, together with all the other beautiful, endless possibilities, garbage morning.

Now, it seems that we're stuck with a relatively average world, full of average non-things to do, especially, I suppose, such an apparently average non-thing as taking out the garbage on a Saturday morning. But you have to understand. To a kid such as I was, taking out the garbage was at least an adventure, probably even more.

Why, there were brown paper bags with names of stores from all over town printed on them, and they were full of intrigue. Of course, it was necessary to investigate them. One particular Saturday morning, I spotted a cold pork chop bone, with small remnants of tooth-marked pork still clinging to it, and it reminded me of Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday afternoon was the one that Joey Atherton and I had spent scouting through the heavily posted, dense, dark pine woods on the nearby private golf club grounds. Those folks hired big, ugly, smelly people whose job it was to search out and capture vagrant trespassers like Joey and I. If they spotted you as you slipped cautiously out of the woods to take your chance at a dash for freedom over the perimeter fence, they'd roar down on you in their rusty, faded green maintenance truck, leap out, and capture you for evil purposes.

One of the guys that drove the rusty, green truck chewed so much tobacco that his three remaining front teeth----two on the top and one on the bottom----were stained dark brown and black, and his old, wrinkled face was always overgrown with white stubble. Joey had told me once that there was another guy who worked there who only had one eye. Right in the middle of his head. Centered above his nose. I hadn't seen him yet, but I was watching for him, as we made our penetration into the foreign woods that Wednesday afternoon that the pork chop bone reminded me of.

In another bag was the box that the sanding thing my Father bought for his electric drill came in.

I had followed him downstairs to his cellar workbench on Thursday night and watched him fasten this neat gadget to his drill, then turn it on. The flat, horizontal sanding surface loudly shook in orbits, and when my Dad touched it to a piece of wood, a cloud of light brown dust burst into the air, then settled gently on the vise and the workbench and the floor. It was heaven for a kid. Such a miraculous tool, such fine noise, and such a warm, secure feeling watching Dad in control of it all right there on his tool-cluttered workbench in the cellar that always smelled cool and damp and good.

I'd fold down the tops of all the garbage bags as I stood there in the garage----all except one, which I'd save and sort of ignore until just before I was ready to go get the garbage cans from the big chunk of cement they sat on in the back yard near the clump of three Silver Maples. Then, I'd discover it and act surprised that there was one more, and I'd peer cautiously inside to find, perhaps, another nostalgic treasure.

That morning, I had been lucky. Inside the last bag was a pair of dungarees I'd worn on Tuesday. Ripped open from the crotch to the cuff of the right leg, they attested to a near-death experience in the dark of nightime when Fred Kellam and I undertook an excursion in troublemaking.

You have to understand a little background material on Fred and I before you can experience a fair appreciation of the little episode I am about to relate. You see, Fred was a tall, lanky kid who towered over me by about a foot and a half. Sort of a security blanket for the dwarfed. His boisterous laugh would rattle anything that happened to have the misfortune to be nearby, and his quick wittedness gave him the ability to make a joke out of even the morose. Together, Fred and I represented a real threat to the neighborhood that, for some reason, allowed us to continue living there, nonetheless.

Fred and I were invincible, except for one thing. That was the problem we had trying to weasel out of our respective houses for a night on the streets. Sometimes if I said: "but Mom, Fred's Mother is gonna let him go out tonight," it helped. But not usually. Usually my attempt to escape the house involved all sorts of agonizing beseechment before it worked; that is, if there had been any chance to begin with that it was going to work in the first place.

I could always be sure that, as I was busy working on my Mother to set me free, Fred was always busy at his house doing the same. I'm also sure that his Mother, like mine, wanted to know what it was we could do outside at night that we couldn't do just as well inside. Now, that one required some special verbal footwork, because there always seemed to be something that, as kids, we shouldn't really tell our Mothers, especially if we expected to ever get out of the house again before we were thirty.

For instance, we couldn't tell them about the night the road construction crew left their bulldozer parked in the grass near the water main construction site---the site that had the saw horses with blinking yellow lights on them all around it. We couldn't, for instance, say what an exciting wonder it was for me to bravely climb up in that bulldozer's command seat in front of all those magnificent buttons, pedals, switches, and levers, and how it felt to push, throw, and pull a few of them in a jest to Fred that I was going to start the thing. And we certainly couldn't tell them about my absolute horror, shown clearly by the look on my face at that moment when it did start, and I couldn't shut it off, and how, terrified, Fred and I had run as fast as our little tennis sneakers would carry us away from that thing as it sat there in the black night, growling a long, low growl.

I'm sure you see what I mean. It wasn't that we were bad kids. We were just stupid. Kids are born stupid, and it seems it's their duty to remain stupid about those and other kinds of things until they're about thirty-five, or so. In light of all this, and amazing as it may seem, the two of us did manage a close-grips escape into the night once in awhile, and the night of the dungarees was one of those nights.

Our chosen target for terror that Tuesday night long, long ago was a Mr. Webb, a neighbor who lived two blocks up from us. Both Fred and I went to school with Mr. Webb's son, Mike, and one of the persistent stories that floated through those academic halls was about how strict Mr. Webb was with his children. Aside from the fact that he made them study school work and practice their music all the time, rarely letting them see the light of day, it was also rumored that he would not allow them to watch television. Worse than that, though, was the allegation that Mr. Webb would not even allow a television in his house. Of all his purported offenses, this was certainly the worst.

On that Tuesday night, Fred and I had decided that Mr. Web needed to be reminded about the importance of lightening up once in a while. With this goal in mind, we had masterminded a plan that would give Mr. Webb something to think about, and, at the same time, perhaps as a pleasant by-product, something that his Son could get into a snicker over while practicing his trombone that night.

Mr. Webb's house was on a road which had narrow crushed stone shoulders, and each house's front lawn on the street had a shallow drainage ditch running lengthwise across its frontage next to the shoulder. The ditch in front of Mr. Webb's house was deep enough to hide two thin kids if they laid all the way down in it----something that Fred and I had in mind that night as we arrived, armed with plentiful handfulls of tiny crushed stone, borrowed from the road shoulder.

After considering several alternatives, Fred chose a fine looking pebble and gave it a stiff shot at the roof of Mr. Webb's house, off of which it bounced with a sharp click.

No response.

Next, it was my turn, and I chose an equally fine-looking pebble and heaved away. That time, the porch lights came on, and the inside door opened, revealing the very large silhouette of Mr. Webb through the screen door. Neither Fred nor I had actually ever seen Mr. Webb, but we had been warned by friends that he weighed seven hundred thirty-eight pounds. His silhouette looked just like that of a man that weighed seven hundred thirty-eight pounds. He looked up and down the street in an attempt, I assume, to find the trouble makers who he would then turn into his victims. (We had also been warned that this is what Mr. Webb did regularly to trouble makers). Everything must have looked good to him, because his shadow shrugged once, then closed the inside door.

Fred and I laid in the ditch and bounced around in laughter as hard and quietly as we could. Victory number one. Snicker, Michael, you lucky devil, you.

Attack number two. Fred poked his head up from the ditch and looked over at me, and I looked back at him. He had that stupid smirk on his face that warned of an approaching explosion of Freddy laughter. I shushed him as much as possible and choked down my own gasps of delight. The last thing we needed at that moment was an explosion of Freddy laughter. Both of us contained ourselves, thought about the situation for about two seconds, stood up at the same time, and each hurled a pebble at the roof, then dropped back down into the ditch. That time, we got a delightful, double-barrelled "click-click," and again Mr. Webb's monstrous shadow appeared behind the screen door. He gawked, dumbly we thought, up and down the block.

Any further postponement of an explosion of Freddy laughter was completely out of the question, and he laid in the ditch jerking spasmodically, trying to supress his laughter, which pulsed from his nose in quick bursts that very much resembled the quacking of an excited duck. "Shaddup, Fred, shaddup," I excitedly whispered to him again and again. Slowly, his jerking and quacking subsided from maniacal, to out of control, to intermittent, then stopped altogether.

We laid silently in the ditch, feeling Mr. Webbs hideous vision scanning the yard. Carefully, I laid one eyeball over the rim of the ditch. No more Mr. Webb. Tremendous. Victory number two.

Attack number three. This had to be a good one, of course, a zapper sort of hit and drop attack that would get every pound of Mr. Webb's mass in a tizzy. Instantly, Fred and I stood straight up and fired the balance of our pebbles at the roof, and, just as each of our stupid little arms were completing their swings, all seven hundred thirty-eight pounds of Mr. Webb, all seven hundred thirty-eight pounds of that growling monster who regularly locked his kids in their rooms to study and practice music, and who only slid a piece of stale bread and a damp washcloth under their doors once every ten hours, all seven hundred thirty-eight pounds of that man came bursting through the screen door at full speed, running and snorting like a bull, coming straight at us through a shower of "click, click, clicks" overhead.

It took Fred and I a moment to come to our senses, retrieve our arms from their frozen, revealing positions at the end of their tremendous swings, and, of course, the first thing we did when we finally understood what was happening, was run like crazy. As I remember it, little pieces of smoking rubber were flying from our sneakers as we ran from a very angry Mr. Webb. There was no telling exactly what was on that man's mind, but it was certain to be something which would make it very difficult for Fred or I to enjoy our next birthday.

Our feet hit the ground ten pitter-patters for every one of Mr. Webb's clomps, and there was that cold terror of the potential of being captured for evil purposes, as Fred and I, sneakers smoking, roared around the corner into Schnable's driveway. Our plan, as we had discussed it by yelling back and forth over Mr. Webb's monstrous snorts and mumbles, was to run through Schnable's back yard, grab the limb of a tree, and swing over a barbed-wire fence into the Spodak's back yard, thereby leaving the panting, snarling Mr. Webb on the far side of the fence.

And there was the tree. Fred took one jump, grabbed the low branch, and swung himself over the fence in one swoop. Then, up I jumped for the branch, which is just about when I remembered that I had forgotten that I was so short. The sound of Mr. Webb's thumping feet grew fearfully close. I could feel my face turning cold and white. One more try at the branch. No good.

Ah well. It was a fact of life, even at that young and tender age, that one did not win all the time. Still though, the choices were diminishing by the second, and I convinced myself that it was either over the hard way right then, or a certain, untimely death at the hands of a seven hundred thirty-eight pound raging maniac. I chose the hard way.

Up with the left leg, straddle the barbed wire until the foot touched the ground on the safe side, then, careful, careful----pull. Wouldn't you know it? Something got caught. I wriggled around a bit and decided that whatever was caught didn't hurt, so I pulled again. Sure enough, open came the pants from the crotch to the cuff of the right leg with a resounding "riiiiiip." I hit the ground and was up and running just millimeters from Mr. Webb's sweaty, murderous, clammy grasp.

Of course, Fred, fun-loving guy that he was, had been taking this all in, looking backwards, while running full speed ahead. When Fred came to a full realization of the scope of what was happening to me, he broke out in an explosion of Freddy laughter. He was still laughing, looking backward and running forward, when he ran straight off the edge of the six foot high shale wall above Spodak's rose garden.

It was wonderful, ripped pants and all. One second I heard Fred's laughter and had a full rear profile view of him, then he seemed to hang momentarily suspended, suddenly silent, in mid-air, his feet still running full speed, then he dropped from sight with a thump into the roses and thorns below.

How many times Fred yelled 'ouch' that night is still open for discussion. I lost count at thirty-six. He just couldn't seem to say it fast enough, and I thought how, even the roaring-mad Mr. Webb must have burst into silent laughter at this sight. It was then my turn to laugh, which is what I was doing as I jumped over Fred, my right pant leg flapping crazily in the wind, and kept on running.

Back in a safe haven near Fred's house later that night, we both checked each other and ourselves over to make sure we still had all the parts we came with. As I remember it, we also experienced a few more bouts of Freddy laughter, recalling the occurrences of the night.

Don't ask how we explained our conditions to our parents.

Anyway, that's what the last bag of garbage made me remember, as I packed all the bags into the cans and carried them out to the driveway's end. As always, I paused a moment to look down our street, almost covered over and shaded like a tunnel by the maple trees, which lined both sides of the road. Standing there in that early morning, early summer sun, and glad to be a kid, glad and warm.

Many years later, while visiting home for a weekend, I was all set to take the garbage out, when Dad told me that it wasn't garbage day on Saturday anymore. What nerve of circumstance. Joey married and divorced and married again, off selling shoes somewhere. Fred almost married and well on his way to becoming a lawyer. Me in the service, and the Webbs and the Spodaks moved away to wherever old neighbors disappear when you grow up. And Saturday wasn't garbage day any more.

Ah well, things do change. But, we really did used to take the garbage out on Saturday, and that, along with all the other wonderful schemes of childhood, made it very, very good when I was a kid.

Your comments or questions are welcome at houghton@classicpreservation.com.

© H. Houghton

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