If We'd Had a Few Men Like That in Guadalcanal...

Ha ha, looks like ol’ Donna is back again. I went out this morning and there she was, sitting on the front lawn as if she had a perfect right to be there. I don’t know why I call her Donna---giving a name to a small bag of trash probably doesn’t make a lick of sense, but anything that keeps coming back again and again seems like a friend after a while. That’s certainly no ordinary white plastic sack of apple cores, cereal boxes, soup cans, and old Clorox wipes anymore.

Nope, I don’t why Donna keeps coming back no matter how many times I set her in the trash can and take her down to the curb. The first time it happened, not even a day went by before I stepped out the door to look down and see her there sitting on my WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA welcome mat. Nowadays, it can be up to two weeks before she mysteriously plops herself down on the lawn or beside the mailbox. Some things in this life just don’t want to pass on to their last end without a fight, I guess. I thought I have might put something in the bag that the trash men didn’t like, but they’ve never even opened it. I asked one of them about it, and he told me he’d had a similar experience many moons ago. It took him thirteen tries to get rid of a bucket of recyclables. At his wit’s end he called the police, who took the stuff away even as he stood there with a small tear in his eye---he’d become real attached to Ol’ Harold, and couldn’t say why of course.

Well, I think what I’m going to do is take Donna in tonight, put her right back in the can in the kitchen where she began, let her get one more good night in there, and then I really have to make it goodbye this time. I’m not a sentimental man by nature, but if this keeps up, soon I won’t have the heart to do what I need to do. I’m sure the neighbors won’t be too pleased to hear the sounds of a chainsaw, flamethrower, and an explosion of fifteen pounds of Grade 2 Dynacore erupting in the middle of the night, but they should maybe pay more attention to their own business, or I might start asking a few questions about some of the little moonlight shortcuts they seem to be taking sometimes with the cremations people are paying good money for.