Conspicuous Altruism at Home

Our family's highway adoption has been...I'm searching for the best word...consummated?

That is to say we just picked up trash from our road's margins for two and half hours this afternoon, which is something we've done sporadically ever since Janelle and I married in May of '99. The difference is that this time we got to use fancy orange trash bags and wear the glowingest reflective vests I have ever squinted at.

It was every bit as fun as we thought it would be. Kali was veritably leaping down the road at first; her enthusiasm was so intense as to cause her to overlook nearly every piece of trash she passed! This could be because she was spending more time gazing at her snazzy vest than scanning for foreign materials. After she developed her eye for it, and as her exuberance mellowed into mere eagerness for the task, she became quite good at spotting beer bottles, aluminum cans, fast food detritus, and matted paper.

Now, I will admonish you not to confuse eagerness with a drive towards efficiency. For once any particular object was discovered, it then needed to be submitted to a proper inspection and perhaps processing before being relinquished into the yawn of plastic film at the bag's mouth. Certainly no aluminum can could escape its due flattening, which when performed by an eight-year-old's foot is not an especially quick and merciful kind of demise. Even wadded-up paper napkins or faded candy wrappers could not be submitted briskly, but merited a curious few moments of gazing as they teetered on the edge of a tender, gloved hand...then toppled in.

Janelle and I called it "meditative trash pick up." At first it was actually kind of relaxing. I mean, how many times in adult life do we really slow down and appreciate the moment we're in like that? But then again, I was spending quite a bit of time standing at the side of the road in a goofy vest holding a giant orange trash bag in each hand and trying to be patient as my daughter picked away at some unit or other of waste matter, gingerly freeing it from the built-up soil and tangled vegetation. It got a bit old, but in a good-natured sort of way.

By the time we made it back to our driveway we were all pretty worn out, but none the worse for the wear! In the end we had a bag each of trash and recycling redirected to their proper end, and could enjoy the satisfaction of having contributed to the well-being of our neighborhood...officially!