Bless me, Father

She also said (this will only make sense to you regular readers of the Bethlehem Press who remember Senior Moment #23), she also said, with equal fervor and disdain, “You are always throwing something out in the trash.”

She’s right. For I am the warped only child of a white-gloved woman I fondly nicknamed in my elegy “Mrs. Clean” and raised in a home in which, until I was a tall teen, she stood on chairs to dust along the top of door jambs. Cleanliness was coequal to godliness.

It was said disparagingly of great American poet Walt Whitman that he was “a friend of bus drivers.” I, who taught Whitman for over half a century, am, unique in north Bethlehem, a friend of trash men, namely, Joe and Dylan.

A trifle after sunrise Thursdays, you can find me at the back gate eagerly awaiting, like a kid for the ice cream man, the hungry growl of that monstrous, maniacal, mechanical marvel of modern technology, the trash truck.

I never tire of feeling the world a little bit cleaner as Dylan, who was a linebacker in high school, lobs our weighty sacks of waste into the hippopotamus-like maw at the rear of the truck.

Of course, what my wife really meant was I’m always throwing out something of value to her. Right again. I was bred with a broad definition of trash, and I’m hypo-allergic to clutter. I want to be remembered approvingly at my viewing (I’m 85, as you know) as a man who left his cellar virtually bare.

My only infidelity in our 60+ years of marriage has been serial violation of the treasure-trash boundary.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Since my last confession I mistook the Bubble Wrap from Amazon purchases for trash and executed death sentences on a 12 inch in diameter cake dish that has been cake-less since we engaged the Atkins diet 25 years ago and a 30-gallon trash bag filled with fancily decorated cookie tins from the era of Betty Crocker.

And I am heartily sorry.