Dumpster Diving

So I stop at the Dollar Store because I want a new luffa. Being the Dollar Store I buy all kinds of other crap - candy bars, tissues, Band-Aids – you know how it goes. I bring my own nylon bag, but in my checkout haze the cashier puts everything in an unmarked, brown paper bag. This unsettles me, but fine. It’s not worth dumping stuff from container one to another, even though this is not my system. I’m trying to be more flexible in my life and not make a huge deal out of such things. It is in trying to be better that I am wrong. I drop the bag somewhere in the house, I don’t care where, and go about doing things. 

The next day is Sunday, I decide to take all my paper recycling up to the church. As a family, we put out a lot of paper. Junk mail, schoolwork, old manuscripts, new manuscripts – I put them in brown paper bags and when there seems like too many, I load up the trucklet and head for St. Stephen’s. I think they make like twenty bucks a month from everyone tossing their paper in the shed-sized bin. Part of me wants to believe it also makes me a better citizen. It is in this belief that I am also wrong.

Later that day I remember my bag from the Dollar Store. I can’t find it. I in the familyroom, kitchen, bathroom . . . the bag has vanished. It’s not small. We’re not hoarders. We should be able to find a brown paper bag . . .

No, I tell myself. I am not that out-of-it. There’s no way I chucked a bag of candy and bathroom supplies thinking it was scrap paper. No way. I’m not that daffy. And I would’ve had to be that daffy twice. Once to load the SUV, then again to snatch it up and hurl it into the bin. No. I’m not that . . . touched. After another search, I decided there’s no other course of action. I announce that I’m returning to St. Stephen’s to see if my Dollar Store bag is in the dumpster. Max, for reasons that escape me, says he’s in. We drive up to the church and look inside. Someone else has been there and deposited several hundred pounds of shredded documents. Light, wormy snow. Oodles of it. There’s a light rain, and the temperature has dropped, and Max climbs in anyway. We dig around finding a couple of the bags I chucked. They are easy to spot. Most of the stuff says “Martineck” in the upper right corners.

We do not find the bag of Band-Aids, tissues, luffas and candy.

I return home not know if I’m going crazy, already crazy or if rolling around in wet shreddings proves I am simply nuts, no other modifier necessary. It is a depressing internal conversation. Do the mad know they’re mad? Is there a moment, like this one, that tips you from kooky to insane?

Two days go by and I go down to the basement to get the Firestick off the old TV. Between the old TV and the couch facing it sits a brown paper bag. Inside are Band-Aids, a box of tissues, two luffas and a mess of candy wrappers. There are more of those on the couch. My first thought is mice. But they don’t unwrap. And they don’t lug bags down a flight of stairs so they can relax. Mice never relax. I realize I’m wrong one more time . . . in my choice of mammal of interest.

I take the bag up to Max and show him. Max – after watching me search the house, drive up to the church, and rummage through a soggy dumpster for thirty minutes says, “Oh that bag?”