Every Thursday night outside my little home in Prairie View, a little contingent of faded Ford pickup trucks cruise slowly along, quietly searching. Every so often, a solitary man will hop out, pull on the heavyweight work gloves which ride shotgun, and grab a random item from a random front yard. Few people know them, no one is angry when they pick up things from their curbside, no one notices when they quietly roll on to the next community. They are the Pickers, and Prairie View is one of the last neighborhoods that they cruise before making their weekly pilgrimage to the Lake County Scrap Metals yard just down the way.
In nature, when a tree falls as a result of age or wind-driven forces, it will slowly revert back to the earth from which it came. Generations of Powderpost Beetles and colonies of Carpenter Ants gnaw quietly, day and night, slipping silently beneath the deadfall’s bark and boring into its heartwood. Over years, even the most stately hardwoods become spongy and soft, as the combined efforts of endless chewing and moisture penetration turn them back into rich, black humus.
In nature, we have the beetles and ants, but in the suburbs, the Pickers do the lion’s share of large object recycling. On Thursday nights, all good suburbanites roll their trash to the curb, and with it, the occasional large metal object. The Pickers roll through, with an interior radar which seems almost magnetically drawn to discarded metals. I’m continually amazed at how quickly they arrive, and have noticed a weird correlation between the size of metal scrap, and the speed at which they materialize. Upon moving in several years ago, I rolled the first of a pair of old gas grills left behind by the diminutive previous owner to the end of my short drive, only to see an ageless, unremarkable man loading it before I’d returned with the second one. I helped him load it, though he didn’t need it, and we exchanged broken pleasantries, each trying to speak the other’s native language.
His name was Sanctius, which once upon a time translated to mean “saintly,” or “holy.” We’ve always exchanged waves since, and more than once I’ve traded him a few dollars or cold six-pack for an old Cannondale that never should have gone curbside in the first place. He’s been amused that a square white guy like me can make a mean tamale, and I’ve been amused to find he knows the words to every Johnny Cash song playing quietly inside the cab of his old Ford.
Last week, during a sleepless spell between chemo treatments, I realized with clarity that I may not last long enough to restore the 1985 Toyota 4Runner I found a few years ago on a Nashville Craigslist posting and bought on a whim. It’s mechanically sound, but like all old red Toyotas from that era, the body is shot and faded to a sickly pink. No reason it should differ from its owner. Better to be rid of it, as it is a mocking reminder of what a healthy body should look like, but doesn’t.
I began with a rusted pink quarter panel I’d removed weeks ago and never got around to, and was in no way surprised to see Sanctius’ brown F-150 quietly roll to a stop moments later. As I slowly carried the second piece to the end of the drive, his dark eyes held mine for a moment, then looked past me to the detached garage I’ve used for years as a shop and man-cave. When he looked back to my eyes, there was no hint of joy at knowing he’d found a small fortune in scrap metal and odd parts, just the human concern that one person expresses to another in unspoken empathy. He backed his old Ford up, loaded what he could, then arranged to return an hour later with his younger brother Christopho to load the rest.
Upon his return, Sanctius surprised me for yet another time. He knows the look of a man being eaten by cancer, he told me, and he and his brother took a few minutes to pray with me, for strength, for courage, for peace. It was the peace part that resonated most, for it was the kindness of a stranger that most showed me the true meanings of two brothers named “holy” and “Christ-like.”
In nature, when a tree falls as a result of age or wind-driven forces, it will slowly revert back to the earth from which it came. Generations of Powderpost Beetles and colonies of Carpenter Ants gnaw quietly, day and night, slipping silently beneath the deadfall’s bark and boring into its heartwood. Over years, even the most stately hardwoods become spongy and soft, as the combined efforts of endless chewing and moisture penetration turn them back into rich, black humus.
In nature, we have the beetles and ants, but in the suburbs, the Pickers do the lion’s share of large object recycling. On Thursday nights, all good suburbanites roll their trash to the curb, and with it, the occasional large metal object. The Pickers roll through, with an interior radar which seems almost magnetically drawn to discarded metals. I’m continually amazed at how quickly they arrive, and have noticed a weird correlation between the size of metal scrap, and the speed at which they materialize. Upon moving in several years ago, I rolled the first of a pair of old gas grills left behind by the diminutive previous owner to the end of my short drive, only to see an ageless, unremarkable man loading it before I’d returned with the second one. I helped him load it, though he didn’t need it, and we exchanged broken pleasantries, each trying to speak the other’s native language.
His name was Sanctius, which once upon a time translated to mean “saintly,” or “holy.” We’ve always exchanged waves since, and more than once I’ve traded him a few dollars or cold six-pack for an old Cannondale that never should have gone curbside in the first place. He’s been amused that a square white guy like me can make a mean tamale, and I’ve been amused to find he knows the words to every Johnny Cash song playing quietly inside the cab of his old Ford.
Last week, during a sleepless spell between chemo treatments, I realized with clarity that I may not last long enough to restore the 1985 Toyota 4Runner I found a few years ago on a Nashville Craigslist posting and bought on a whim. It’s mechanically sound, but like all old red Toyotas from that era, the body is shot and faded to a sickly pink. No reason it should differ from its owner. Better to be rid of it, as it is a mocking reminder of what a healthy body should look like, but doesn’t.
I began with a rusted pink quarter panel I’d removed weeks ago and never got around to, and was in no way surprised to see Sanctius’ brown F-150 quietly roll to a stop moments later. As I slowly carried the second piece to the end of the drive, his dark eyes held mine for a moment, then looked past me to the detached garage I’ve used for years as a shop and man-cave. When he looked back to my eyes, there was no hint of joy at knowing he’d found a small fortune in scrap metal and odd parts, just the human concern that one person expresses to another in unspoken empathy. He backed his old Ford up, loaded what he could, then arranged to return an hour later with his younger brother Christopho to load the rest.
Upon his return, Sanctius surprised me for yet another time. He knows the look of a man being eaten by cancer, he told me, and he and his brother took a few minutes to pray with me, for strength, for courage, for peace. It was the peace part that resonated most, for it was the kindness of a stranger that most showed me the true meanings of two brothers named “holy” and “Christ-like.”
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