I had grown fond of my pal, the battered old recycling bin. It had been parked in our garage for years, decades maybe, and got rolled out onto the street every Wednesday afternoon for the weekly pick-up the next morning.
Like an old friend, the bin was always there, ready when I was with my empty olive jars and soda cans and a week’s worth of San Francisco Chronicles.
That gray can had been my special pal during the covid months. I sorted the mail on the hood of my car and tossed the junk mail directly into the big gray bin, preventing, in theory, any stray covid microbe from slipping into the house.
My Pal the Recycling Bin
A few weeks ago, I noticed that the lid on my gray can had gone wonky. The pin was missing from one of its hinges and needed to be replaced.
Thursday morning, I flagged down the California Waste Solutions driver and told him about the pin.
This man was all business. He took a look my gray can, got back into his massive truck and called headquarters.
A replacement can would be delivered the next day, he told me. No problem.
Couldn’t they just fix this one?
No, the can is too old. No replacement parts.
How about if I keep the old can? It works just fine.
(If I ditched this old can for a new one, I reasoned, a huge piece of gray plastic would either go through an expensive recycling process — or take up space on the planet for millennia in a landfill somewhere.)
Sure, the driver said. I could keep the can. No problem. Just phone the office and tell them I didn’t want the new can to be delivered on Friday.
What to Do With a Battered Old Recycling Bin?
The driver and I stood there on my driveway pondering the old bin while I considered my options.
Do I keep the old can and take the time — ten minutes? a half hour? a full hour? — to look for a phone number, get a live person on the phone, and cancel the new can?
Or do I let the nice man take away my faithful pal of many years and use that time for the other projects on my to-do list, like phoning my daughter who was home with a sprained ankle?
Not so long ago, I had resolved to pay better attention to how I spent my time. I would make choices. I would husband my time. Important tasks might be left undone and that would have to be OK.
And now, here I was, facing one of those existential, value-laden questions. Do I lavish a half hour of my life on saving that old gray can and the planet? Or do I keep that time for myself?
I kept it for myself.
With that, the Waste Solutions driver picked up my old pal and tossed it into his truck with the other recyclables.
Right away I felt a stab of remorse. Surely this had been the wrong decision.
A Week at the Sonoma County Writers Camp
But I was just back from a week-long writers retreat up in Sonoma County redwood country — at the Sonoma County Writers Camp. Writerly decision making had been a recurring topic.
Writing is all about making decisions, our mentors, Ellen Sussman and Elizabeth Stark, wanted us to know.
Should the character in a novel clobber the villain with a lamp? Or with a rolling pin? Would it make for better storytelling to let the character seduce the villain instead of beaning him?
These are the choices the writer must make, we were told. These are the choices the writer is entitled to make. There is no correct choice waiting in the wings for the writer to discover. The right decision is the one the author settles on.
If the writer is a memoirist or essayist like me, we were told, and she is dealing with real life events, the writer decides which scenes go into her story and which ones don’t.
There is no correct way to write a novel or a memoir. It’s up to the writer to decide.
Which brings me back to my old recycling bin.
I decided not to keep it.
More about life as a householder at “Five Things I Like About My Kitchen.” Also, “I Let the Maytag Man Into My House and Here’s What I Learned About Human Nature.”