Years ago, our local area recycled glass (they stopped doing that awhile back). It was picked up in the typical, blue recycle bin on the same day trash pick up happened. Normally, we wouldn’t have produced much glass to recycle… maybe a jam or honey jar, a salad dressing bottle here and there, that sort of thing.
In 2007 when Mario and I moved up to Oregon there were maybe a 6-12 bottles of wine or glass beer bottles in the weekly bin. By 2013, there were about 21-28 wine bottles in the weekly bin.
The next year, my parents had relocated up to Oregon. Somehow I had managed to keep them from knowing about all the empty wine bottles until one day, my dad happened to roll up my driveway as I was putting the overly stuffed, blue recycle bin out at the end of the driveway. No hiding it any more. My dad knew it wasn’t me who was drinking them. It was no secret that Mario liked his wine, but no one but he or I really knew how much of it he was drinking. He asked how long that had been going on and all I could say was something along the lines of, “This is nothing new”.
Even my dad, who spent some years as an alcoholic himself, tried to encourage Mario to quit, to seek help, and to stop destroying his health. Like all of us who tried, it was to no avail.
From 2014 on, the bottle numbers varied but averaged to about 3 per day by the end of the week. Since Mario was the one who got up early, he was often putting the bin out. He’d hide extra empty bottles in the spare bedroom we called the music room and put those out while I was still asleep. But there was one time I once counted 36 bottles (which did not all fit in the bin).
The recycle truck would roll up around 7:30am or so and I could hear all of them being dumped into the truck because the cacophony of the sound usually woke me up. I’d imagine the bottles breaking as they contacted other glass in the truck. It became kind of a metaphor for how Mario’s drinking shattered his own life and his future … slowing cutting out the good things and the good things being replaced with the shattered shards.
I could only imagine what the recycle truck driver thought (or the neighbors, as I’m sure they could hear that too).
When the glass recycling ended, the bottles went in the trash, but the trash truck made the same sort of cacophony. Many times there were so many bottles in there on top of trash bags, that one would inevitably fall out when the trash truck’s arm would pick the bin up and start to tip it over the truck. I’d come out to shattered, green wine bottle glass at the edge of the drive way and into the river rocks that bordered the gravel.
I did my best to pick up the pieces … I’m sure there’s another metaphor in there somewhere.
Years later, due to weather or movement of stones and gravel or whatever, tiny shards that I’d missed will sometimes show themselves.
Today as I walked to the mail box the sun peaked out and I saw a little glint of green. A tiny shard that will forever represent big and rather tragic memories.
