Trash Cans

IN MATTERS of home improvement, I am known as The Dimwit, a title proudly passed down to me by my father and, for all I know, his father before him. Builders of shelves, we never were. Hammerers and sawyers, not even. When asked about the full range of my household repair skills, I always answer, I can just about screw in a light bulb.Yet even in the embarrassment of such full disclosure, I can now say this on behalf of myself and all other previously mocked men of my ancestral limitations: At least we can do more than certain city work crews, of whom The Sun's Tom Pelton last week plaintively asked: "How many Baltimore public works employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

I BOUGHT MYSELF a birthday present this week, a new trash can.It was one of those gifts a guy has to pick out for himself. Besides, no one in the family seemed to care much either about the trash can or the birthday.A kid's birthday is a big event, requiring much planning, endless discussions and the issuing of invitations. But a dad's birthday usually generates about the same amount of household excitement as the return of a lost sock. A few congratulations may be offered, but other topics quickly become more interesting.

I WAS SITTING at the kitchen table sipping my morning coffee when I heard a noise in the alley. First I heard a "wham!" Then came the throaty sound of a car engine gaining momentum.Both sounds were familiar. The "wham" sounded like our metal trash can taking a hit. The engine sounded like the one in the family station wagon.Sure enough, when I investigated, I found that once again one of our cars had clobbered one of our trash cans. The can was dented, and I was deflated. My elaborate trash-can defense system had failed.

At the end of each day, Paul Hill would come home, slip out of his day clothes and into some of the finest garments sold in Baltimore -- complete with two-tone shoes and cowhide carrying case.An evening at the pool hall awaited him. The carrying case was for his pool cue."This is what he did every day. Every day. My father was a pool shark," said his daughter, Marilyn Jean Carroll. "He shot pool real well and hustled with his pool stick."Mr. Hill, who died Tuesday at 74 of cancer at the Perry Point Veterans Affairs Hospice in Perryville, was a trash collector for the city sanitation department for 30 years.

SOMEBODY called the newspaper recently and wanted to talk trash. The caller was transferred to me.I am not sure what I find more alarming, the fact that my colleagues associate me with trash, or the fact that they are right.I ended up having a terrific time talking with Jane Maher, the caller. We discussed the fine points of trash collection, of trash-can etiquette, of trash-can crime, and trash-can sanitation.Perhaps in other conversational salons, great minds discuss the true meaning of supply-side economics or the impact that the discovery of Archaea, tiny one-celled organisms found on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, will have on science.

SPRING HAS COME to our alley. I realized this the other evening when I was out in the alley playing catch with one of my kids. The kid threw the ball over my head, and as I hurried back to catch it, I stumbled in a pothole.The hole wasn't there last fall when the kids and I played football in the alley. This winter's ice and snow had weakened the pavement. Now, with the spring thaw, a pothole was born. I made a mental note to call the city pothole repair crew, which, as I recall, is not very enthusiastic about fixing holes in alleys.

Back alley.In Baltimore County, the words are apt to conjure up unpleasant visions such as potholes and puddles, weeds and trash cans, barking dogs and stray cats and maybe an aging car or two.From Catonsville to Dundalk, residents of some of the county's oldest neighborhoods have to keep their trash cans out front and prefer not to park behind their homes because of huge potholes and loose concrete in their alleys.But relief -- in the form of fresh concrete -- is coming as the county paves its way through a list of the 109 worst alleys in a streamlined reconstruction program.

Cleaning your basement is a painful process. It forces you to be brutally honest about your hopes, your dreams, your old lighting fixtures.I discovered this recently as I stood in my basement and looked at a bathroom lighting fixture, one that my wife never liked. For 10 years I had been promising myself that someday I was going to do something clever with this exiled light.But last Sunday, in the dust of the afternoon, I faced the fixture and knew the time had come to say goodbye.If the light had resided in the cellar of a talented electrician, it might, I told myself, still have a chance at leading a productive life.

Vandalism in the open space and woods of Dorsey's Search Village has been more destructive this year than any other in memory, said the village's manager.Since winter released its icy grip, wooden trash cans and boardwalk bridges over wetlands have been burned or broken, debris from drinking parties has been strewn, shrubs planted to stem erosion have been ripped from the ground, and signs and a community building have been spray-painted, said Dorsey's Search Village Manager Anne Darrin and Village Board member Ria Malloy.

I am playing the trash can game again.It goes like this: Somebody steals your trash cans. You prowl distant alleys vowing to find the missing cans. Eventually you call off your search and buy new cans. But you don't do this too quickly. If new cans appear too soon after the old ones have disappeared, the thieves are likely to return to the scene of the crime, and grab the new ones.This is either the third or fourth time in 16 years that my trash cans have been stolen. Looking at things on the bright side, my trash cans have an average life-span of about four years.

Disappearing cans, and a flawed trash policy When I first moved to my neighborhood in West Baltimore 22 years ago, I diligently put out my trash in metal cans with tight-fitting lids. After having four or five cans so badly dented by the trash men tossing them around that they were unusable, or having them stolen by who-knows-who in the first year, I reluctantly switched to setting my trash out in plastic bags. With the public information campaign by the city telling me that putting out trash in trash cans has always been the law and is now going to be strictly enforced, I purchased a sturdy, plastic wheeled and lidded container for $14.87 plus tax. Put my trash out in the new can the evening before trash day the first week of the new trash schedule.

If there was confusion, anger or absent-mindedness about Baltimore's new trash collection schedule, it didn't much show on city streets or alleys Monday morning. A few people in Wyman Park, Upper Fells Point and some Northern Parkway neighborhoods put out trash cans and bags, as they had done for years on Mondays, but mostly they didn't - apparently having got word that there was no pickup. Trash is now collected once a week, Tuesday through Friday depending on the address. The city has been calling and mailing notices for weeks about the changes.

"Mankind is ... a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption." - Georges Bataille (1967) There is something distinctly human about trash. Zoologists and entomologists have found many connections between humans and animal behavior, primate psychology, even the DNA of fruit flies. So far, though, there is no evidence that hordes of bees, colonies of ants or herds of elephants are endangered by their own junk. Only human civilizations pose such a threat to themselves.

Reducing trash a responsible choice Annie Linskey's article "Garbage pickup bill trashed at hearing as too restrictive" (April 8) inaccurately characterized the tenor of the City Council hearing on the city's "One Plus One" trash plan. The Department of Public Works has spent more than one year studying current trash service and household trash volumes. Our study indicates that most households that recycle can easily stay within the new 64-gallon weekly trash limit. Lobbyists for the real estate and landlord communities did voice concerns about new volume limits at the hearing, even as they registered support for the bill.

I don't know about you, but I find the Container Store catalog practically pornographic. I can spend hours pawing through it, imagining a life in which everything not just has its place, but a color-coordinated, perfectly sized and thoughtfully configured one. But as with all porn, the thrill is illusory. Eventually, I return to the real world, where my clutter remains scattered on countertops or forever underfoot, free radicals that defy containment by mere polypropylene stacking bins or galvanized storage cubes.

Baltimore officials are developing plans to distribute 64-gallon trash cans to all city homes as a part of a proposal to reduce garbage pickup to once a week. The green heavy-duty plastic receptacles would include an attached lid to keep rats out and wheels for easy movement. Each city-owned can would have a bar code, assigning it to a specific address. The design of the cans enables garbage trucks to lift and empty them automatically, helping the city to "efficiently and effectively provide better services," said Mayor Sheila Dixon.

Launching the next step in what is expected to be a larger media campaign, Baltimore officials said yesterday that they will soon emblazon trash trucks and garbage cans with new slogans intended to reduce littering. The campaign is more edgy than past anti-litter efforts. One sign pictures a bedraggled rat hunched over text, "He loves when you put your trash out too early." Another sign, to be posted on trash cans, says, "Pick up the litter, lift up the city." "We're going to deliver this message to the public in any way that we can," said Mayor Sheila Dixon, who has made cleaning up the city a major theme of her tenure.

THE PROBLEM -- Piles of trash accumulate daily at a bus stop on the north side of Northern Parkway and York Road. Two trash cans near the corner are far enough from the stop that many people do not use them to dispose of their rubbish. THE BACK STORY -- There are about 4,500 trash cans placed strategically on sidewalks across the city, said Joseph A. Kolodziejski, head of the Bureau of Solid Waste at the Department of Public Works. Many of those are near bus stops and other high-traffic areas, including downtown, and main arteries such as York, Reisterstown and Harford roads.

WHETHER YOU are rich or poor, young or old, wired or wireless, your trash stinks. It is part of the cycle of life. After expiration comes redolent decomposition, especially in August. Anyone caught downwind of a fragrant sanitation truck recognizes this aroma as part of a Maryland summer. Proust had cookies to link him to memories of his past, we have the bouquet of spent crabs and other leavings from the summer table. Part of our civic duty, our contribution to the commonwealth, is to donate waste, sometimes twice a week, to the municipal scrap heap.

Two years ago, city officials thought they had found an answer. They distributed 100,000 trash cans to residents and made them pledge to toss their refuse in the plastic cans, not the streets. But the problem of inadequate trash-can use persists. Officials say residents are using the receptacles at dismal rates, as low as 20 percent in some neighborhoods. As a result, the city has an estimated 3.25 million rats. "We need to do something," said Elizabeth Weiblen, deputy director of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods.