A month ago, the leaves were just turning yellow—a little late in the season—but now they have made up for lost time by departing quickly and completely, leaving us barren and gray and wet and cold and in November in the Pacific Northwest. Thinking about times past, wondering why we have to say goodbye so soon. We sit in the house and look out the window and listen to Casals playing the Bach Suites for Cello, which is music that accommodates but doesn’t drag you down into the melancholy face of fall. It has other faces, as well, all that scarlet and orange and yellow riotous color, but it doesn’t have them right this minute.
I’ve been trying to become the kind of person who has a lot of horizontal surfaces that are not filled up with stuff. That is what gray fall does to me. I’ve spent the day cleaning out file cabinets (all those IRS returns and supporting papers from 1997, for example), desk drawers, just ordinary drawers, trying to clear out enough inside space so that all the objects cluttering the horizontal surfaces will have someplace to go. I’m not there yet; there’s not even one entirely empty horizontal space in our main room. But I can hope.
And also I can go to the transfer station to deliver 140 pounds of recyclables of various kinds, much of it the aforementioned paper. Incidentally, it would be good if we could find something just a little lighter than paper which, when gathered into the thousands of sheets really does get heavy. I suppose that’s what the computer is supposed to do for us, but we are mostly so afraid of the computer losing its mind with all our paper in it that we keep duplicate information on actual paper. We’re a wary bunch.
The dump was also gray and wet, but well populated with people bringing in washing machines and multiple garbage cans and countless dark green plastic bags filled with paper and plastic/glass bottles and aluminum cans, all of it with a faint odor of decay. You come in and they weigh you and you go out and they weigh you again, and then you pay for the difference. (Maybe restaurants could work that way, too, but payment would be reversed, of course, for increased weight, not for decreased as it is at the dump.) It’s not the worst system in the world (which leaves considerable room for improvement, of course). But it does remind me of the fact that I didn’t used to have much experience of the dump because the operators used to pick it up at our houses, and now we take it to, metaphorically, to theirs.
There is still no resolution in sight for this problem. The company that applied for a new permit has not been selected; the company that used to have the permit has now applied for a new permit. According to the WUTC internet site, the next meeting on all this is December 10. And then it will be Christmas, of course, and the New Year, and nothing is going to happen then. And then it will be 2010. Maybe in the new year, we can bring ourselves to call off all the disputations and disagreements, can do what a friend referred to as ‘an Emily Litella.' In the grand old days of Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner regularly inhabited a character named Emily Litella who would complain bitterly about some topic (I particularly remember her rant on ‘Soviet jewelry’) only to have, eventually, someone point out that she had got the whole thing wrong as a result of a simple error. “Soviet Jewry,” they would say. And Emily would get a momentarily stunned look and then say, ‘Oh. . . Never mind.’
It’s going to take something like that to get progress on the trash front, I’m afraid. But Gilda Radner died a long time ago, alas, and it's possible we no longer know how to say, 'Never mind.'
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