Recycling to a Fault

Photo: Ileana Johnson

2018

Roy, an elderly gentleman in his 80s, is a Democrat from a bygone era, when being an American was a source of pride. He grew up very poor and never forgot the value of a penny. He became the proverbial penny-pincher.

He cracked me up when he told me he cut the top of his socks off because they constricted the circulation around his ankles, a sensitive area stemming from removal of veins in the area. Why spend money on a new pair of short socks when an old cut-off one could do just fine?

On our last visit, he served us birthday cake to honor Tim and me. The plates were elegant square shimmery white with matching forks. Knowing that he would never buy such expensive plastic, I wondered where they came from.

After inquiries, I found out that they were the plates from his granddaughter's wedding the previous year which he had carefully carried home, reused and washed numerous times.

After I ate my slice of cake, I dropped the dirty plate in the trash can in the kitchen. When we were all finished, Ray retrieved my plate and washed it again, along with the rest of the trice-used plates and cutlery.

It is amazing that he has never forgotten what it was like to grow up part of the time in foster care during a time in America when we had not yet become a throw-away society.

I sympathized with him - mom and I used to wash plastic cutlery and even Styrofoam containers from McDonald's and re-used them. I felt that it was such a waste of materials.

Nobody recycled in the late 1970s because it was too expensive to do, I was told, it was cheaper to bury the trash in the city landfill. Our hometown’s junk yard tried recycling aluminum cans and used payment as an incentive.

I drove one day through the mounds of crashed old cars and twisted rusted metal to turn in my three bags of empty soda cans. Loose nails and pieces of jagged metal littered the yard everywhere. I left with $14 and a badly punctured Michelin tire that cost me a bundle to replace. But I had recycled.

While I could not forgive Roy his vote for Obama twice and for Hillary, I respected his penny-pinching and appreciation for reusing, repairing, not replacing, and recycling. A skilled handyman who could repair most things, his garage was filled wall to wall with tools and pieces of junk that might come in handy to fix something for his family or the neighbors.

P.S. Years ago, when my first husband and I got married, we visited an older lady in the country and she took us to a shed she wanted cleaned out for the spring. We found a beautiful china hutch that was discarded on one side, with beautiful carvings. The wood was discolored by time but otherwise undamaged. We asked if she was willing to part with it and she sold it to us for $25. My husband proceeded to refinish it with love as a weekend project. His best friend from high school refinished antique furniture as a hobby and taught him how to do it. When he was done, the cabinet was beautiful! I still have it to this day in my dining room. I would never part with it. They don't make such beautiful things out of wood anymore. And it still has the key and the original glass. I keep my decades old china and crystal from Romania in it and the wine glasses his grandmother received as a wedding gift in the 1920s. She has long since passed away but I remember the joy when we received the never-opened box of china and crystal that she had not unpacked since her wedding - the tissue paper was disintegrating as dust when I opened the box. She gave it to us in 1978 after our wedding.