Full Circle

There is a 20 story apartment building on the corner of my block. Unlike the eighty some year old art deco buildings on the rest of the block, this particular building is pale non descript brick. There is a never ending parade of ambulances for the old and overdosed, cop cars for the offenders and abusers, and fire trucks for god knows what.
I’ve always considered it an eyesore and the source of most of the broken car windows , drug traffic, and petty crime that comes with this area. The building in my opinion lacked character and if it vanished into thin air I wouldn’t have missed it one iota.

But yesterday I saw an amazing thing transpire and now I don’t mind the buildings presence so much. About once a month the management must go through all of the apartments that are recently unoccupied. Evictions, deaths, midnight moves, etc. All of the previous occupants abandoned possessions go out on the curb. Threadbare sofas, shitty black lacquered end tables, ugly lamps from the 80's,clothing, you name it, and its there on the curb.

Had I not been witness to the phenomena I am about to share, I would probably have composed some lament about the poor and unfortunate, and how sad it was to see the evidence of the newly homeless or the recently departed, cast out on the curb. And that still holds true, but with an addendum of hope and humor.

So the maintenance people carry all of this stuff out the back door and pile it on the curb next to a huge roll off dumpster and eventually a truck with a claw will come along pick all this shit up and load it in the dumpster. Imagine a 50 foot long pile of stuff at the curb. So as I’m standing across the street waiting for Max the yorkie to tire of barking at squirrels I notice people picking through the stuff on the curb. A tired looking young black woman with 3 little kids grabs a lamp and a baby swing, an old man grabs a box of something, and various people, of various ages and assorted skin tones start to appear. They grab things and carry them back into the same building they just came out of.

They remind me of ants. What starts out as a trickle of people grows to a couple of dozen. Somehow they know when the guys carrying the stuff out are coming and they all disappear just in time. The pile gets smaller and smaller even though there is a steady supply of new stuff set on the curb. Eventually there is nothing left worth taking and the truck comes along and carries away the remaining bones of someone’s abandoned possessions.

The whole process took a couple of hours at best. I would come out from time to time to watch. What caught my attention was the different reactions people had when they were going through all of the stuff. Some did it hastily, almost greedily, snatching up as much as they could before heading inside. Others would find some small thing and hold it up gleefully as if they had plucked a Faberge egg from a pile of trash rather than a crappy lamp with no shade. And others , like the black lady with the kids seemed almost ashamed or embarassed, never looking up from the pile, and hurrying inside with her head still pointing down at the ground