Story for Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day and Verna's wanting to know if she knew who wheelchair man is,
I will:

1. Honor a grassroots group of victorious neighbors
2. Tell you a story
3. share a new year's resolution and the tipping point of how I finally turned green.

I have to dig, but I know that somewhere in mom's photos I have a group of adults dressed up like trash cans parading in, well, a parade. They represented the grassroots neighborhood group SCROD that came together and fought against the corporate world of trash, the clean and dirty politics and amazingly won a battle against a huge landfill which would have changed the landscape of their farms and homes.
Their battle was long and costly with much time, money and blood, sweat and tears sacrificed.
They also backed up their talk and became recyclers before it was hip to be green.
You would have thought that this would have been enough inspiration to make me recycle a coke can or two, but unfortunately, I stuck to all the old excuses and didn't.

Fast forward a few years. I'm at work and a man in a wheel chair wheeled over and asked me if I could help him. I said sure and asked what he needed. He asked if I could hang his bag of books off one side of the back of his chair, which I did. Then he said, "I hate to bother you, but there are two bags on the bottom of my chair. Could you pull the one in front toward the back?" Again, I was glad to help. Then he explained that the clerk at the grocery store had put his six pack of beer under the chair, but the bag in front of it was his recyclables and he was afraid that he wouldn't be able to reach them when he got to the the recycling bin.
I cocked my head to the side and asked him:
"You recycle?"
Wheel chair man looked at me incredulously and answered with an emphatic but not condemning..."uh, yeah!"
Now again, you would think, yeah, I know, you would think that this incident would of had me running home and bagging up all those coke cans.
No, I didn't, but I did start to make a plan and think about resolutions.

So then, fast forward, I dunno another 6 months and Sister Susie and I are in the car again...and maybe Dave and Sandy are there and we are talking about recycling and I announce, "I don't know...I want to, but my kitchen is just too small, Carmel doesn't have recycling pick up, Indianapolis only takes 1's and 2's and you have to sort it all out, blah, blah..blah...I just can't do it.

Insert approximately 15 seconds of silence, then Sister Susie quietly states:

"Wheel chair man recycles."

Dammit!
Why I did I ever tell her that story?!
I had successfully rationalized my guilt away and deleted the whole incident from my memory bank.
But there it was staring me in my huge carbon footprint face.

So...it took awhile, but I made the resolution.

Less Black

(my regular trash can)

More Green

And even tho it makes more piles in my already cramped apartment, it has been 5 months and it seems to have become a habit....if not an obsession. Not only those coke cans go, but also cardboard, paper, plastic and glass which makes the black garbage amazingly little.

So hail Scrod members and Wheel chair man!

Thanks for the inspiration!
(and the guilt)

And Happy Earth Day!