Or the lack thereof.

I want to start out today by wishing a very Happy Birthday to IZA. Whose birthday was yesterday and I failed to mention it then. My bad. Be sure to wish her one today if you forgot to do so yesterday.

I live across the street from a car wash. This gives me ample opportunity to feed my need to people watch. I could wax poetically about the dynamic between the varieties of people who feel the need to turn their music on full-blast to pretend to detail their cars or the relationships of people when it comes to washing the car, but I won’t. Not today.

What I want to talk about is a group of people I call “pickers”. These are people that I relate to on a more primal level. They dig through garbage cans the way Teacher Sis and I dig through clearance racks or lost-and-found. A level that gives me hope that I’ll survive the apocalypse solely on the basis of digging through crap no one else wants to find things I can use.

There is one picker in particular that I want to talk about. There is a whole subclass of pickers that focuses on people who pick while walking their dog. Sort of multi-taskers. I usually see them twice a day, once in the morning before work and again at the end of the day after work. He is one of this group.

This particular picker walks a basset hound. I’ve have seen him like clockwork for years. Every once in a while he picks without the dog, but it is rare. But for the past three days, there has been no dog. And for some reason, this makes me sad. He normally has this little grin on his face. The kind Billy Bob Thornton has on his face in Slingblade. The past three days though, no smile. And I feel sad for him. I can’t help but run the gauntlet of scenarios in my head. Perhaps, the dog is sick and can’t come. Maybe it has had major surgery on an in-grown dewclaw. And then, inevitably, that the dog died. That this picker will now wander the parking lots and car washes, picking through trash cans and checking the coin slots for quarters, alone.

And that makes me sad for him. Kind of like watching that ASPCA commercial with Sarah McLachlan singing about angels and shit. It is not a great way to start your day.

Regardless, that is how my day has begun. But I can’t sit around and mope about some stranger whose dog may have died, thus forcing him to pick through garbage alone. I have work to do. I have a bank run for Jesus, tutoring, prepwork and dinner with the exchangers, and prepwork for tomorrow’s tutoring.

I just wanted to give you something to think about today.

I hope your day is wonderful. More soon. ~SC