Last night, I had to recycle something fierce.
I was on vacation in Iowa all last week, and when I came home there was a mound of soda cans, plastic jugs, beer and wine bottles against my back door. (Thanks roomie!) For the rest of Pinellas County, this wouldn’t present a problem: you just carry the items a few feet to the curb.
But, alas, I live in St. Petersburg, where the only thing lacking more than curbside recycling is police officers.
As the last bit of light left the sky, I loaded the recyclables in my car and trucked them to a nearby recycle center at Crescent Lake. I pulled in just as another guy in a red Jeep threw his last beer bottles in a huge green dumpster and left.
I parked and began throwing my own recyclables in. The cans clinked. The paper swooshed. And the beer and wine bottles crashed. Loudly.
As I strolled back to my car, I heard a disembodied voice yelling about "smashing glass." It was dark and I couldn't find the man with my eyes. I called out, "Where are you yelling from?"
"Right here," he replied. I looked behind a dumpster toward the street and spotted him: A hefty, middle-aged man. Despite the lack of light, I knew his face was beet red.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2008.