By JAN GLIDEWELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 2, 2001
Sometimes you can see trouble on the horizon.
For me, it happened the day before Christmas when I went to check the garbage cans to see how much more overflow from dinner preparations and gift-wrapping they could handle.
The good news was that they had been emptied. (I never have figured out the schedule.) The bad news was that, where there had been two, there were now three.
And the interloper has obviously seen better days. It is plastic, battered and lidless.
Uh oh.
I remembered a column I wrote 25 years ago when a friend of mine, Paul Veslock, who recently resigned as a major for the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, had an extra garbage can that he wanted to get rid of.
The problem is that it is almost impossible to throw away a garbage can.
It's practically an exercise in Taoist philosophy.
Taoists see that the function of an object may well be in what it isn't rather than what it is. It is the empty space of a pot that carries the water, and (rims and spokes not withstanding) it is the empty space in the center of a wheel that carries the load.
And if you want to hear the sound of one hand clapping, all you have to do is try to convince a garbage hauler that a can normally used to hold garbage suddenly has become garbage.
Veslock told me back then that he tried leaving notes on the can, to no avail.
He also tried folding up the plastic can he was trying to get rid of and stuffing it into a metal can, but found it the next day extracted, re-formed and standing next to the cans he wanted to keep.
He even dragged it down the alley and left it in a sort of indeterminate place, hoping the haulers would pick it up for being in the wrong spot. He found it returned to his space the next morning.
It's not that I'm suspicious or paranoid about my tendency to make fun of the sheriff and his guys once in a while, but I called Veslock on Wednesday just to make sure that he hadn't kept up his battle for 25 years and decided to leave it on my doorstep.
It may sound bizarre, but things get weird at a sheriff's office when a new boss takes over.
Veslock assured me that he had disposed of his problem can and had done so legally, but refused to share his secret.
Left to my own devices, all I can come up with is to gift-wrap it and leave it in my unlocked car. Then whoever steals it can figure out what to do with it.
And, coincidentally, I was reminded on the morning that I write this that our dishwasher is ready for the dishwasher happy hunting grounds, as is our stove, as is our refrigerator.
Apparently, I'm going to have to make a deal with whoever sells me new ones to haul the old ones away.
Reader Linda Jones of Veterans Village tells me that she has been trying to get rid of a perfectly good dishwasher for days, and has offered to donate it to several different agencies, none of whom have expressed interest.
"I called and called," she said, "but nobody wanted to pick it up."
You can, of course, haul old appliances and furniture, and probably even garbage cans, to the dump, if you have the means to do so and if you have the strength to load them. I know I can handle the garbage can, but the dishwasher could be a little dicey . . . and I don't even want to think about the refrigerator.
Laugh if you will, these things are problems for those of us who don't own pickup trucks and whose teenage or adult children have been smart enough to move to other states and countries. One of the reasons I bought a pickup truck last year was so that I could start doing some of that country-squire stuff myself.
It turned out that the truck I bought didn't have enough power to haul anything heavier than a week's laundry, and, one night while I slept soundly, someone stole it.
Oh, sure. That they'll take.
I just wish I had had the chance to put an extra garbage can and an appliance in it first.