It's amazing the things you remember about a person, and when you remember them. I was reading an article on litter when suddenly I was transported back to my childhood, riding around the countryside with my Grandma in her Ford Maverick, gleefully chowing down fast food and, when the food was gone, pitching the garbage out the window.
This was done at Grandma's command. We'd stop at some place with tons of wrapping - Sonic was a favorite - and order many different a la carte items. I'd get a corndog nestled in a cardboard tray and wrapped in paper, fries wrapped in paper, with extra ketchup, and a soda in a paper cup with a plastic lid. Grandma would get twice as much, and we'd start out on our zany spree up and down country roads, feasting to our heart's content. When everything edible was consumed and we were left with an armload of trash, Grandma would smile and say, "Pitch it." "Really?" I would always ask. "Yes, pitch it!" "But isn't it bad to throw trash out the window?" "Oh, it's fine. There are people who have fun cleaning up the roads. This gives them something to do."
So I would roll down the window as far as it would go, and heave a mountain of trash out into the warm country air. Grandma would laugh, and I would laugh, and we'd head back to civilization, full and pleasantly clutter-free.
My grandma's house, which she kept neat as a pin, had several trash cans of varying sizes, and I know she paid for trash service, because I remember helping her take the trash to the curb (or at least seeing it there) on a number of occasions. What anarchist streak drove her to this one particular act of civil disobedience, I'll never know.
"Pitching It" became almost an unspoken in-joke between Grandma and I. She never told me to keep it a secret, and I never thought to blab. It was just one of those things.
Until one day, riding around with my Mom in her car, eating some hastily acquired fast food on the run from point A to point B, driving through our small Missouri town, I finished my food and immediately heaved all the packaging out the window and into someone's carefully manicured front lawn. Mom looked at me like I had sprouted horns. I immediately knew I had messed up.
"What did you DO!?!"
"I...uh...I pitched it!"
"You WHAT!?!"
"I pitched it!"
"Why would you do such a thing!?!"
"I don't care. It's wrong. Even if she tells you to do it, I want you to say no."
"Okay, Mom. I'm sorry. I won't do it again."
After circling back around the block and being made to collect the trash I had pitched, we completed the ride in stony silence. Now I can look back, put myself in my mom's shoes, and realize she was probably more embarrassed than anything else, but at the time I felt like something someone would scrape off their shoe with a flash of revulsion and perhaps a few dry heaves thrown in for good measure.
It's a bizarre phenomenon when you are a child, attempting to live by the dictum, "respect your elders," caught in a situation where not just an adult, but one you are related to, who you are close with and who you love, suddenly throws out a curve ball and tells you to do something that you know is wrong. In the end, if you are like me, you do it because (on the surface) they told you to, but also (deeper inside) because you know it's wrong and that makes it fun.
Grandma and Mom had at least one conversation. I wasn't privy to the details, but I'm sure it had something to do with my Mom requesting that my Grandma no longer actively encourage me down the long, dark path of the serial litter bug. A reasonable request, right?
One thing I remember about Grandma was her sensitivity and how easily she could sometimes get her feelings hurt. I'm an awful lot like her in that regard. Whatever her eventual calm reaction to the conversation with my mom, her immediate response was one of rebellion. I'd get dropped off at her house for one of my weekend overnight visits, and we'd get ready to go get some dinner. I'd get in her car and notice extra trash - household trash - like she had collected it and brought it outside expressly to "pitch it." And that's what we would do.
It would be easy for me to lay the blame for this anarchy directly at my Grandma's feet, but knowing that I was breaking an expressly proscribed motherly rule ratcheted the entire enterprise into the realm of pure adrenaline. I loved it. I couldn't get enough of it. I'd laugh and laugh and barely give Grandma enough time to find a suitable out of the way spot to pull over before hurtling armloads of garbage into the ditch.
Perhaps my Grandma realized she was creating a monster, or perhaps I was eventually plagued by the guilt that has haunted me all my life. Or perhaps pitching it just lost its luster for us after a while. Whatever the reason, the adventure drew to a close without discussion or fanfare.
As I get older, sensations of the past recede into the background wash of memory, gradually becoming fuzzier and less defined. A few, though, remain etched so deeply into my subconscious that all I have to do is close my eyes and I am living them again. Some of those events struck me so profoundly at the time that they became branded into my heart and soul in an instant and I knew they would be locked up inside me for the rest of my life. Other things found their way in there more subtly. Things such as my anarchist adventures with my late Grandma.
I was conflicted by these experiences as a child, and like so many such memories I enjoy looking back on them as an adult and trying to find an alternate perspective. What could have led my gentle, straight-laced, church-going Grandma to such random acts of lawlessness? Surely it wasn't for the sake of those unfortunate souls whose idea of a good time was to "walk up and down the roads picking up the trash," an explanation that now fills my heart with joy and mirth.
Her biography is filled with tough instances of loss, and of a great number of fairly dramatic decisions in which she had little say and was forced to put up with situations as they presented themselves. It was a different world in the 1950's and 1960's when she was around the age I am now, raising a family and trying to hold things together. Women weren't liberated, yet. Nobody had yet seen the adventage of burning bras in protest.
In such a climate, one must capture the tiny bits of anarchy that float by and be prepared to act on them. In the grand scheme of things, there are worse things than throwing trash out the window. At the risk of twisting my words into pretzels in pursuit of justification - throwing trash out of a window DOES give an opportunity for the adoptive highway parent to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment for beautifying the landscape. I suppose we helped them with that. And, oh, the birds - think of how much potential nesting material was to be found in those paper hamburger wrappers!
Even without realizing it is happening, the people around us cannot help but influence the course our lives take and the people we become. My Grandma was a book-loving Irish Catholic woman who lived squarely in the grasp of tradition while simultaneously remaining free-thinking and open minded. She was articulate, sensitive, and funny. And she was given to small acts of defiance, perhaps as a way to help balance her out and keep her sane.
When she took me to the book store with her, she would not discourage me from the adult horror section, and she would always want to see what I had picked out, but never to censor - rather, she wanted to see if it was something she had already read, perhaps planning to borrow it from me when I was done with it. She treated me like a grown-up well before I was one, and shared her little secrets with me. In a world of madness and pain, she retained a joy and a gleam in her eye. After all, there's only so much emotional baggage one person can carry before it all becomes too much. Sooner or later, you have to pitch it.
