Cleaning the Neighborhood, by anonymous

From MemoryArchive

Who:  Anonymous
What:  Moral conflicts
When:  Present day.
Where:  A suburb of a major metropolitan city in the United States.

This is a little different from the other memories on this site. This is both an ongoing memory, and a confession. Some of you may know about the blog Post Secret. This would not be out of place there.

I live in a decent neighborhood. Its not full of million dollar homes, but its not blighted either. We're full of condos and single story homes. We have a good size shopping center within walking distance thats got everything we need. Theres an elementary school only a few blocks from my home.

Theres a bum that I see sitting around this one particular street corner. He comes and goes every few days. He looks to be in his late 50's. Around my father's age. He has a full white beard and is usually seen wearing a blue coat and hat. Ordinarily I wouldn't be bothered by having him around, despite the fact that I see him rooting through the dumpsters for my condo now and again. He looks clean, doesn't cause trouble, doesn't yell at people. I do have a problem with him however. A lot of the time when hes around I see him sitting on one of those small electrical boxes which are sometimes near the sidewalk. Not the big metal ones, but the ones which are maybe 12 to 15 inches tall. Recently, he has begun to leave large piles of trash behind the electrical box. Sometimes its just a cup or burger wrapper, but at one point, it grew to a large number of full or half full fast food containers and a bottle of "something" in the classic brown paper bag.

I had been watching this pile of trash grow when I would go to the store. He placed it so that if you stand and look at the box head on, you can't see that there's anthing behind it. Unfortunately, the trash pile is quite easy to see from any other angle since its all exposed. One day, I stood on the street corner, and looked at the trash pile. Quite deliberately, I swore under my breath and said to myself. "Thats it. This is going to be cleaned up tonight."

Late that night, I put on a pair of thick electrical gloves, and took a large trash bag from under the sink. I walked the block to where the trash pile was. It had rained not too long ago, and the ground was wet. The fast food containers were swarming with snails. I saw literally dozens of them crawling around the pile. Carefully avoiding touching anything on a part that wasn't covered by the gloves, I began to put all of it into the trash bag. Many of the containers still had food, and the mysterious bottle-in-bag I found was also mostly full. Walking back, I tossed the single sack of garbage into the dumpster at my complex. They were quite full, and I was somewhat afraid that he would just it out again. I tried to make it blend in with the others. The next day however, I noticed that the dumpsters had been emptied while I was at work.

I remember various bums from earlier in my life. There was one who sat outside the library in the city where I grew up. When I was a kid, my mom would take me to the library during the summer. We had to walk past this fellow to get in the library. Unlike the guy I'm writing about now, this bum was deranged and usually drunk. He frequently made some comment as we walked past him. This eventually led to my mom and I calling him "Blabbering Bob." After a while of course, he vanished for good. He only exists in my childhood now.

I also remember one day when I was coming back from the store. (In the city where I am now, different neighborhood.) Staggering down the road, I saw what could only be described as a real-life zombie. This fellow was alive, but it really looked like he had absolutely nothing going on in his head. It looked like the only part of his brain that was still active was that which let him walk around and maybe not bump into things. His face was a contorted mask. His mouth was completely slack, and his eyes never moved.

Finally, I remember a fellow who admittedly might not have been a bum, but was certainly drunk. This was when I was a kid in the late 80s, and my family had gone to Europe for a vacation. We were at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This guy came up to us and started talking to us. He asked what I was reading, since I had my book with me. (A Sending of Dragons, by Jane Yolen). I can still remember how he took the book, looked at the cover, slowly read its name and then gave it back. As we walked up the stairs inside the tower, he grabbed my mom's butt. I don't remember what happened after that. I think we just tried to get away from him as fast as possible.

There are two inherent sides to this. First, I say that I'm keeping the neighborhood clean. By making it unattractive to store his stuff here, Im forcing him to move elsewhere so that our neighborhood doesn't have to have homeless people loitering around. On the other hand, I have disposed of something that doesnt belong to me. No matter how disgusting it is, if there was actual food in those containers, then Ive deprived a man of his food. I dont know whether he stole the alcohol, or begged for money to buy it, or what, but I also took that from him and got rid of it. Finally, I also recognize that when I take actions that force him to move elsewhere, he may not have any elsewhere to go to. It doesn't solve his problems, and it just passes him off to some other community. In worse shape, because I got rid of his food. Every night, I sit inside my comfortable home, that I worked like a dog for, eating my good meals, and enjoying the fact that I have no major problems in my life, while he is out there in the cold and recently rainy world. A person might ask, "Who are you to deny him the right to live on the corner?" "Who are you to take his food?" The only reasonable answer to that is: "Im everyone I need to be."

As a measure of karmic justice, I feel the right thing to do is to volunteer one night at a soup kitchen every time I do this. Of course its good to do that for humanitarian reasons, but I think it would be particularly fiting in this case. (I still need to get around to that.)

Finally, I leave you with this. I wrestled with my conscience once and decided that I had taken the best course of action. The pile has grown again, and now it contains an entire backpack. Tonight, as soon as I post this, Im going to put my black electrician gloves back on, and take another bag from under the sink. It doesn't matter to me what sort of food he's got in there. I don't care how much he paid for the alcohol, and I dont need to know whats in his backpask. My neighborhood will be clean.

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