So it’s such a pretty day that I decided to take a stroll around the hood. I usually just walk to the bus stop or down to some store on the main drag here in The Laurel. But this time I decided to check out the actual neighborhood. I mean I see people walking around when I’m watching Hood Tv , so it would stand to reason that I might see other people from the neighborhood to chat with. Although I really didn’t get more than a smile and a “How’s it going” or a wave here and there. But I discovered that it is a very hilly and steep neighborhood.
Well it was trash day today so the scavengers were out. These are the folks that root through the trash and recycle bins set on the street, and retrieve the recyclables to take them to the recyclers for cash. Most of them just stick to aluminum cans and plastic bottles but the really hard core ones get the glass bottles too. That’s when I saw her. A little Asian woman pushing a heavily laden shopping cart. Judging by the clinking noises it was mostly full of glass. With bags filled with cans and plastic jugs tied to the outside of it. It was the size of a VW Beetle. She, however, was about the size of a ten-year-old. She couldn’t see over the top of it. She was pretty stocky but at maybe 5′ even, that puts her at about 140 pounds tops. I turned the corner ahead of her and started clopping down a very steep hill. In the back of my mind I was going to say something or offer help but I don’t think she should be doing it in the first place. I think the scavengers are a problem, and a liability. I mean I’ve seen the damage an empty cart does when it gets a little speed in a parking lot. I can only imagine what a 250 pound cart full of glass and garbage would do if it started sailing uncontrollably down a steep hill and slammed into a car. Or worse yet into an intersection. As this thought was milling about the ole noggin I heard the frantic slapping of little Asian feet in flip flops from behind me.
Guess what I saw?
C’mon, guess.
That’s right, it was a 250 pound shopping cart full of glass and garbage sailing uncontrollably down a steep hill right towards a Pearl White Toyota SUV. It was quite uncontrolled despite the best efforts of the little Asian woman. She was in front of it trying to slow it down with out turning it as it would have toppled over and spilled the product of hours of trash rooting. Facing the cart and frantically back pedaling down the hill, the carts momentum conspired with both of her cheap flip flops and soon she was just a lump of meat being shoveled down the hill by the runaway cart. I was already running up the hill to help her out as the front wheels had swallowed her legs and she was sliding on her hips and the palm of her hands. This whole grizzly flesh and glass contraption had drifted to the left and she was pinned against the curb by the time I got up the hill to her. I had to put my back up against the front of the cart and give it everything I had to lift the front a few inches so she could get her legs free. Then I wedged the casters against the curb so it wouldn’t go anywhere. She winced and inspected her road rash. I was really surprised nothing was broken. She looked like a Picasso when I got to her. But I guess she was really flexible.
Then she asked me to call her phone because she couldn’t find it. I did. She found it. I helped her get the cart to the bottom of the hill and then during her recap of the events my sorry for her feelings kinda went away.
She was holding the phucking phone in the crook of her neck when she lost the cart. She just wasn’t paying attention.Yakking away and didn’t notice how steep the hill was because her cart was too high to see over and she couldn’t look around it because she was holding the phone with her ear against her shoulder. “I need both hands to push the cart” she said.
ARE you FUCKING KIDDING Me!!!!???!?!
