Tommy, OR Recycles
This is a special edition for the Dancing Waitresses of Niagara Falls:
I’m sitting on the back stoop over at 3 Gunas Lp. Tommy and Southwick are there. Roger, 70, veteran of service aboard the “USS Homer Simpson,” is very comfortable with predictable stupidity and reliable chaos. So he gets along with both Southwick and Tommy, just by saying “yep” or “ya think?” Mostly Roger rides his Harley over to his lady’s place. She doesn’t ride: she isn’t a “Harley” chick, but at 67, few are. Roger decides to park his Harley under her bed this night.
Southwick is new to Oregon, and Honolulu is 30 years behind the times when it comes to recycling. So he asks Tommy, who says: “Business got a reality check in the ’70’s. All that “clean up the environment” claptrap. Business is the same to me: They paid us to dump crap into the river, and now they pay us to get the crap out of the river. Same either way.”
Southwick wants to know about what’s recyclable and how: Tommy says: “Just throw it all together. That’s the best way. Return to Maker. Let Nature take care of it. Either way it goes out by barge, and “Waterfront U” controls the tugs and barges from here to the ocean.”
Southwick foolishly asks Tommy the wrong question, “What exactly do you do at Waterfront U?”
Tommy replies: “Everything on the water: I design ‘em, build ‘em, pilot ‘em, dredge ‘em, dump ‘em, demolish ‘em. Tugs, barges, day care centers, dredges — Anything that takes brains and muscle on the water.”
Southwick asks: “Day care centers? Food carts, too?”
Tommy looks away and changes the subject: “The Old Man always asks ME to do the hard jobs. I had to design a 300 foot dredge that could separate gold from seawater at the rate of 20 Whalesheads per fortnight. He asked me to soup it up to pull his water skis. Just launched it last week.”
Tommy’s word salad seems to make sense, and that scares me. I decide to leave 1950’s Tommy, OR, and take my exit through the front door of 3 Gunas Lp. As I leave, I hear something about the team of Nobel prize winners he had to manage.
Turning on my sanity detector, I go straight to HouseFarm at 8927 N Lombard,selling equipment, lights, pottery, and such for kitchen gardens it is the best example of ecological harmony in St. Johns.
A pillar of respect is often there: he holds and I hold areasoningsometimes. I’m lucky tonight, I enter, and although we don’t shake hands, respect is the first and last words that make the bookends of our conversation. His son finds an ookie bug on one of the plants for sale and brings it over as we talk. He takes it gently, it’s not an inside kind of bug, and takes it outside so it may continue on it’s path.
We talk higher reasoning. Each of us is on our path, we come from yesterday and move through today. We move forward or not according to our own choice and power. Where each of us are on our path is not known to others. Southwick, Roger, and Tommy, too. Church is over. Respect.