Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,65
up rubbish on the sides of the road?” I asked.
And all of them answered, “Sure. That sounds fun!”
I felt like the Horsham District Council should have given them something, a free tour of the Arundel Castle, maybe. It’s the local government’s responsibility to clear away the trash, but in order to maintain all the roads, they’d need a crew of hundreds. And until people change their behavior, how much can they actually accomplish?
“I’m not judging, but do you ever throw litter from your cars?” I asked the men working on our house. They all told me no, and I said, “Really, you can be honest with me.”
I asked the cashier at the local shop, the owner of the tearoom, the butcher. “No,” they all told me. “Never.”
I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?
In trying to make sense of it all, I create a weak-willed weight watcher, an alcoholic, an antisocial teenager, but the biggest litterer I ever knew was my Greek grandmother, who died in 1976. That woman would throw anything out a car window. Her only criteria was that it fit.
“What the hell are you doing?” my father used to shout, and it would take her a moment to figure out what he was referring to. Farting? No. Throwing a paper grocery bag out onto the highway? What was wrong with that? The important thing to Yiayiá wasn’t a clean outside but a clean inside. A tidy station wagon reflected upon you personally, while a tidy landscape, what was that? Look at the sky, littered with clouds, or the beach trashed with shells. How was that mess any different from a hundred cans in a ditch?
My grandmother didn’t drive, but if she had, there’d be no end to the garbage trail she might have left. It doesn’t take many people to muck up a roadside. A devoted handful can do the trick. One of the things I find repeatedly is a plastic Diet Coke bottle containing a meticulously folded Mars bar wrapper. I imagine this is someone’s after-work snack and that by putting the wrapper inside the empty bottle, the person feels he’s done his bit. And though he has turned two pieces of trash into one, until he learns to keep it in his car, I don’t think he’s entitled to pat himself on the back. Who are you? I wondered the first and third and fifth time I came across one of these stuffed bottles. Do you think about the four hundred years it will take for this to decompose, or is this as inconsequential to you as flushing a toilet?
“What the government needs to do is take a sample of everyone’s DNA,” I said. “Then, when a bottle or can is discovered on the ground, we just run a test on the spout and throw the person in jail.”
“What if they’ve poured it into a glass?” Hugh asked.
And I said, “Why do you have to make this so difficult?”
It’s pathetic, really. Here we are, recent immigrants thinking that everything will be perfect once we fundamentally change the people who were actually born and raised here. I tell myself that it’s possible sometimes, though deep down I suspect it’s just rubbish.
Day In, Day Out
Seven is truly a wonderful age. For two days. That’s the length of time my friend Pam and her son, Tyler, who is in the second grade, normally visit. He’s at the stage where whatever I do, he wants to do. This includes wearing button-down shirts; singing “Galveston”—a song made popular by Glen Campbell—until everyone begs you to please, for the love of God, stop; and carrying a small Europa-brand reporter’s notebook. I gave him one the last time he came to the house in West Sussex, and, aping me, he stuck it in his pocket alongside a pen. That afternoon Hugh drove us to the nearby town of Arundel to tour its castle. There was an issue of the local paper in the backseat of the car, and leafing through it on our way there, I came upon a headline that read, “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.”