Wasteful words: From an early age, I’ve been talking trash

Despite a proliferation of counseling services at the elementary school level these days, targeted career guidance isn’t on offer – as far as I know – for any enterprising 8- and 9-year-olds.

Which is just as well. Because if I’d had my way as a Dame School second-grader, my future would have been rubbish.   

As a youngster growing up in Medford in the late 1960s, I enjoyed the traditional recreational pursuits of the time: wiffle ball and punch ball games with neighborhood pals in the summer and spirited games of street hockey later in the year.

But one activity above all others really caught my fancy: following Medford’s sanitation engineers, or “rubbish guys,” around our block, hoping for an opportunity to heft a barrel or two into the back of their truck. I could imagine no better job, a daily routine involving constant movement and minimal supervision.

For a while this was the extent of my ambition in life.

I think the municipal employees assigned to the trash detail enjoyed my company, though I can’t recall any particular exchanges between us. They were kind enough, anyhow, not to shoo me away.

I do have a memory of getting a short spin on a truck once, climbing on to the step at the rear and clinging to the nearby handrail, then hearing the growl of the engine as we proceeded to the next house and inhaling the piquant odor of the mainly dry trash compressed into the body of the truck. It’s a smell – like the wafting aroma of Proust’s madeleines – that today has a nostalgic effect, transporting me instantly back to my childhood.

I was maybe 8 or 9 and my brief spin on a rubbish truck was better than any ride I’d been on at Canobie Lake, our family’s preferred amusement park destination.

Sadly, my mother is no longer available to confirm this story – as a work-in-the-home mom, she would have overseen my childish behavior – but I’m convinced it happened. Working in my favor is the fact that the waste management vehicles back then – which were owned, operated, and maintained by the city – were less intimidating than the driver-only machines lumbering around Medford today and manhandling residents’ wheelie bins with their mechanical arms. 

Also, observing a young boy riding on the back of a rubbish truck and grinning from ear to ear wouldn’t have triggered a neighborhood alert in those days.

Of course, if I’d had my finger on the pulse of the consumerist culture emerging around me – second nature, you’d think, for an acquisitive boy like me – I would have gone into waste in a bigger way. Given my connections in the industry, I might have carved out a lucrative sideline for myself, going door to door offering to organize and dispose of my neighbors’ trash the way kids used to peddle their snow-shoveling services.

Market trends were certainly in my favor. According to statista.com, a website that looks reliable enough to this savvy Boomer, I could have been making some serious green by the time I was in high school: “The generation of municipal solid waste in the United States has increased significantly over the past 60 years. In 1960, the country produced approximately 88 million tons of MSW, and by 2018 that figure had more than tripled, amounting to 292 million tons.”

And since the COVID pandemic, no doubt, our collective trash has been piling up even higher, even with ramped-up recycling initiatives. As I've seen first-hand here in Dublin and on visits home, not every householder understands what's required for an item to be recyclable.

Also, I needn’t have worried that being involved in rubbish might in some way diminish my social standing. In recent decades waste has taken on cultural (and of course, environmental) significance.

Tony Soprano, for example, describes himself as being in waste management whenever anyone asks how he makes his money. Given the scale of the industry, this is a plausible explanation for the gangland boss’s opulent lifestyle. Unlike me, though, neither of Tony’s children, who believe the ruse at first, shows the slightest interest in pursuing a lucrative career in waste.

Likewise in the literary world, Don DeLillo has been exploring the theme of waste for years. In his first book “Americana,” published in 1971, a character suggests: “Garbage tells you more than living with a person.” And in DeLillo’s 1997 masterwork “Underworld,” protagonist Nick Shay is an actual waste management executive.

When I was a kid helping the local trash guys sling barrels in the late 1960s, I never considered that I was working at the forefront of an issue and an industry that would be so important in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, there were no career advisors then who might have told me to forget my formal schooling and stick with the rubbish I knew.

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest paperback publications are  “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations” and “Looking Homeward - Essays & Humor from a Misplaced American.”