For as long as I can remember, I liked to poke around in other people's trash. Whether there was some symbolic voyeurism to this, I can't say for ceertain. But I grew up in a junker's paradise: New York City. This was during the 1970s -- New York was messy and chaotic in so many ways. That city scarcely resembles the tidy and genteel New York of today.
When I was in grade school, my friends and I used to run about the upper West Side after classes. I guess our parents figured that it wasn't right to keep a kid confined in a small apartment, or perhaps they were ignorant of the particular dangers faced by a tow-headed prepubescent boy in that city. Whatever the case, we were afforded a great deal of freedom and we used it to the hilt. We climbed into old buildings, ran from perverts in the woodlands of Central Park, and we dug in the trash heaps.
Being children without access to a garage for storage or even dolly for moving, we were naturally forced to disregard many a tempting find. But we grabbed smaller stuff, a practice which was -- at least in my household -- grudgingly tolerated. All these decades later, my mom still uses the Prussian blue metal pie tin I dragged home one day.
