Wednesday is trash day. Blue can for recycling. Green can for everything else, barring hazardous waste (which always struck me as a great name for a rock band).
If I let my memory go way back, I can recall a rusty furnace in the alley where we could burn trash. Our neighborhood then became enlightened and we put out the metal garbage cans for the men who arrived on the back of the garbage truck and who jumped down and emptied the cans into the massive compactor.
My younger brother used to lean over the back wall and cut a weekly deal with one of the garbage men: old comic books in exchange for a bag of pecans. It was a while before we told him that our pecan tree's limbs, loaded with nuts, stretched over the alley.
[Fred Allen joked that in his neighborhood, if you didn't have enough trash for the garbage man, he left a little for you.]
Phoenix was one of the first cities to use the one-person garbage trucks. I was working in city hall and recall the grand stir that caused.
The new trucks are progress but very mechanical and clean. There are times when I sort of miss the messy drama of the old days.
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