Beggars can be Choosers
When we lived in Madrid there was refuse collection every day. The apartment block we were living in shared 2 wheelie bins - one for plastics and one for organics - and they were collected and emptied every night. Normally this is an adequate level of service but when you’re moving house and leaving the country, and have to dispose of the accumulated clutter of two years, the bin capacity quickly comes under serious pressure.
It’s not a big deal though. There are certain unofficially designated dumping points around the town where you can drop off anything from a wardrobe to a colour TV to an entire home heating system, and the binmen will take it away without a fuss. At least, we don’t hear the fuss. It’s long past our bedtime when the rubbish is collected. For all we know it’s the tooth fairy taking it away. Next morning it’s like it was never there.
It was at one of these dumping points that I dropped off a large bag of clothes that weren’t worth carrying home to Ireland. And although nobody really cares about these things, I was self-concious enough to drop the bag off in the dead of afternoon - siesta time - when there wasn’t a soul around to see me.
Or so I thought.
I passed the spot again a half-hour later and saw that my bag of clothes had been opened, neatly sorted through, and scavenged of anything deemed useful. A little while later, I noticed a little old South American woman sorting through the remains. But to no avail. Anything worth taking was gone.
At first it was disconcerting to see people rummaging through my cast-offs in the middle of the street - maybe I should have cleaned the clothes before I threw them out - but as the scavengers rummaged and discarded, and rummaged and discarded some more, my attitude changed to one of wounded pride.
“How dare you discard those perfectly good jeans? OK, there’s an ink stain in the left pocket but they’re perfectly wearable!”
“What’s wrong with the shoes? I know the sole’s split but I’ve been wearing them like that for the last month!”
I felt like going over and making a case for the quality of my poor discarded cast-offs.
So it appears that beggars can be choosers especially when it comes to choosing from my wardrobe. I think I have to raise my standards a little now that I’m back in the ‘real’ world.
Mark Waters marked time at 1:03 am on September 23rd, 2004 .
