My favorite part of working at the store is trash duty. As you can imagine, an enterprise like Hope Thrift produces prodigious amounts of trash. You can also imagine that when a thrift store decides that something is worthless...it’s ridiculously worthless. Anyway, yesterday I emptied the huge rolling trash receptacles—the ones that are shaped like cubes that you could fit several dead bodies in—at least five times. It was a huge trash day. There’s a big dumpster out back. My job is to separate the run of the mill junk from the cardboard, since the cardboard goes in a different dumpster. The reason I love this job so much is that I get to throw everything made out of glass into the dumpster...violently. There is nothing quite so therapeutic as the sound of breaking glass!! My favorite is when I run across a set of like. . . Iowa State shot glasses or something. They make a heck of a satisfying sound breaking into a million pieces.
But yesterday, I took more time actually looking at the things I was throwing away, noticing what kinds of things people sour on, get tired of and eventually reject. So much plastic. I think we humans have an intrinsic understanding that no matter how convenient and lightweight plastic is...it’s cheap. We don’t prize things made out of plastic. Once it serves its purpose, we move on. Plastic things are disposable. Lots of things are disposable, and I have two huge dumpsters packed to the gills to prove it. The kids today, these millennials are trying to ween themselves off of convenience. Their big mantra is sustainability. We grownups mock them for it, shake our heads at their minimalistic world view. Well, if you spent a day hanging around the Hope Thrift dumpster, you would develop sympathy for their desire to produce less trash. But, this isn’t what struck me yesterday as I was firing fastballs with tea cups into that big green dumpster. I was thinking of how our relationships have also become disposable.
Pam and I have been married for over 35 years. We’ve enjoyed great successes and our share of failures great and small. We brought two little ones into this world and watched them both become beautiful grownups. We’ve built a home and crafted a family. But none of it would have happened if we both weren’t totally committed to each other. If either of us had walked away as soon as it got hard, or thrown in the towel when suddenly marriage was no longer fun and games, none of the life we now enjoy would have been possible. Our relationship, like all marriages has featured moments of great joy, deep love and combustible romance...but also epic disappointment, titanic frustrations, and times where the only thing combustible about our relationship was our tempers. Ok...my temper. But we stayed together because we aren’t disposable. We aren’t made of plastic. Human beings aren’t built for convenience, we are built for commitment. Our society is filling up dumpsters with all manner of things never intended to be so easily discarded, like small gold-framed pictures of a woman in her wedding gown—I threw one of those away yesterday. There was a lump in my throat. I hear stories of newborn babies ending up in dumpsters, the barbaric end game of this disposable culture.
So, yeah...yesterday I was reminded of just how much I love my wife while working next to a dumpster.
Thanks, Hope Thrift.
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