dumpster nuggets

I rather made a fool of myself today.
I assumed something without testing it.
From my assumption, I wound up interrupting people who could have been working.
I learned something, though. And what I’ve learned, I shan’t forget.


You see, I was volunteering at my church. I put myself on the landscaping schedule, and this was my week to go pull weeds.
It’s a good thing, pulling weeds. Getting down in the dirt, scrabbling around with a spade, breathing the clean fresh wind, touching the wood and earth and plants and bugs.
I spent a solid hour, weeded a good-sized patch of perennials and wood chips. When I was done, my five-gallon bucket was overflowing with the unwanted fauna, trash, and dead flower stalks.
Now, where to put it? My first thought was to bring it home, just take care of it myself and not have to bother anyone at church. But our trash comes only once a week, and our family of five fills that can up beyond its capacity every single week. Looking around, I spotted the huge dumpster the church keeps on the far end of the lot. Well, of course. I pull church weeds, I use the church dumpster! So I trotted off across the vast parking lot, bucket in hand, iPod blaring The White Stripes dolefully in my ears. Simple enough.
Twenty yards from the dumpster, I glanced up and noticed a sizable chain barring entry. Well, that’s common enough- trash is one of those commodities being hijacked routinely, no surprise they keep it locked up. The dumpster is in one of those wood fence setups to disguise the ugliness of its existence, and the chain held the massive doors shut directly in front of access to the trash heap. One end of the chain was fixed to the left door, while the other end had a massive gleaming piece of metal that I assumed, naturally, was a padlock.
And that, folks, is where I went wrong.
Setting my bucket down with a sigh, I trekked back across the parking lot, into the church vestibule, and went in search of someone who might hold the key. The girl in the front office was thrown for a loop- “We lock the trash bin?” –and went in search of the maintenance guy for me.
Our church is pretty good-sized. Not a mega church, those scare me, but not your local little country parsonage, either. Tracking someone down requires a little bit of legwork. Front desk girl eventually found maintenance guy, off working with some painters, and called him towards us,
“Do you know where the key to the dumpster is?”
He blinked at us.
“The key,” she repeated, “she has to throw away some weeds and the trash is locked up.”
Now he looked fuzzled,
“We lock the trash now?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling like this wasn’t going to end well, “there’s a big chain on it with a padlock.”
The painters set their stuff down now and stared at me as well. I was starting to feel like the low point of everyone’s day- dumpster girl. Then I saw a light come on in his eyes,
“Oh, no, that’s just a thumb toggle lock. Just push it open. We never lock the trash.”
“Oh.”
Everyone smiled and laughed and went back to work. I walked back across the parking lot, walked about ten steps closer to the dumpster than I had before, and saw that indeed it was just a large push lock. All of that for nothing. All I had to do was walk a few yards closer and see that it took merely the flick of my thumb to access the trash bin. Easiest thing in the world, right?

How many of us react to life in this way? We see a goal from far away and it looks so hard, possibly unattainable. Do we march right up and knock? Some of us do. Many of us, however, would rather walk the long way around before finding out that it was right there the entire time. How often have I heard statements like these from people I care about:
“I could never get accepted into that school/gallery/team…”
“That kind of business would never hire me…”
“I could never have a spouse/kids/relationship like that…”
“No one would ever vote for me…”
“The publishing/acting/modeling/dance/music world is so hard to break into, maybe I should just abandon it altogether…”
I’m guilty of that last one myself. I have books, good books, sitting on a hard drive, waiting patiently for the day I gain just enough confidence to print them off and send them to be reviewed. I can visualize the day that I get the first issue back from a publisher, the day that I walk into a library and see my own name on a shelf, the day someone, somewhere, shakes my hand and tells me that my words touched them in some way.
But for some reason that I cannot even precisely name, I am scared to take those last ten steps toward the garbage can. I see the big, shiny, terrifying imaginary padlock of rejection slips and editors, and I would rather walk the long way round than face my fears, laziness, low self-esteem, whatever.

It wasn’t anything earth shattering. I didn’t ruin anyone’s day, hurt anyone, or set any projects back with my silly request for a nonexistent key. The people involved probably wouldn’t remember today if you asked them. But the situation revealed something to me. Driving home from church that day, I reflected that I had had the key in my possession the entire time- my own wits. My own strength. My own ability. It’s there.

And the next time anything at all that I want or need looks inaccessible, I’m going to march right up and rattle the doors. Just wait and see.

Labels: courage, dubious wisdom, fear, garbage, tenacity