June 27, 2008
Of Books and Garbage Dumpsters
In the hard-on hope of injecting a shot of levity into the exchange concerning the tossing of books, I offer two incidents from the life of Ryan.
Time: Circa 1974.
Place: Dallas, Texas.
I’d loaned my paperback copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to my friend Lee, who, after reading it, sought to return it to me but could not turn it up in her apartment. Asked her roommate, Dale, if he’d seen it. “Oh, yeah,” he replied. “I threw it out this morning. I thought you’d read it.”
Out to the dumpster she went, where — standing inside the dumpster — she spied a man in a cheap, vaguely shiny suit rooting through the garbage. Parked next to the dumpster was a beat-up Buick with license plates bearing the legend “THE REV”.
Later on that day, she retrieved the book.
Time: Circa 1989.
Place: Southernmost Illinois.
After lunch, returned to my office in a university library. Student assistant relayed a message, apologizing that he hadn’t gotten it down quite correctly, as the man who’d called “had some kind of speech defect”. Returned the call. After speaking with the man, explained to student assistant that that’s just the way you’re liable to sound if you have a wad of tobacco stuffed in your mouth.
Set out the next day, together with graduate assistant, to take a look at the congressional papers about which the man had called, boxes of papers of an Illinois congressman stowed in the warehouse the man either owned or oversaw. Man tried to pressure me into taking a number of old State of Illinois “Blue Book” reference volumes such as the library already possessed in multiples. I declined. Man dug in his heels and said I couldn’t have the one without the other.
I got tough. I hooked my thumbs into imaginary belt loops, looked off to the side, and said, “I’m not running a trash removal service, mister.”
So: once we got back to the library with the boxes of congressional papers and the boxes of Blue Books, I was kindly steamin’. Backed the van up to the loading dock, right near the library’s garbage dumpster, said to the graduate assistant, “Help me pitch these damn books,” and commenced to heaving and flinging, hoping all the while that no photographer from the campus newspaper would happen along.
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