The thing about my trash collectors is that I can never figure out how long it will take them to collect anything we leave out.
It depends on their mood. Some days I hopefully put out a full can of plastic bottles for recycling, and then I have to schlep it back behind the house so I could try again the next week. And then the next week they take it. The same can!
And some things they never feel like taking. I have a garbage can with a huge crack down the side and large hole at the bottom, and they won’t take it. If I fill it with stuff, they empty it. If I leave it out there empty, they ignore it. And I can’t just say “Whatever; let it blow down the block,” because #1, it doesn’t catch wind anymore, because of the hole, and #2, I spray-painted my address on it a number of years ago like a genius.
So right now I use it for cardboard recycling, because cardboard weighs nothing, and all the pieces are big enough to not fall through the holes.
But my current question is how long it’s going to take them to get rid of our old… How can I put this? Because we’re all still thinking about Achashveyrosh, let’s call it our “royal throne.” Yeah, throne—that’s a good word for it. It’s the best seat in the house, where people do their heavy thinking and from which they issue decrees loudly through the door and pass judgments on disputes between their children.
And I don’t know if it’s garbage or recycling. It’s one of those things where the trash collector likely won’t take it, and then recycling won’t take it, and after two months of it sitting in front of your house, you finally chop it up and put pieces in different cans, and the trash collector is like, “Really? I’ve been looking at this for 2 months, and it suddenly disappears and the trash cans are heavier?”
Or it will just sit out there so long that you start using it as a landmark to give people directions to your house: “We’re the ones with the throne out front.”
We can put house numbers on it.
You also don’t want it sitting outside your house for too long, propped against the phone pole, because it’s basically an invitation. All the dogs taking walks will think, “Oh! He made it official!” I don’t need anyone passing judgements in front of my house.
It’s also a weird time of the year to have it sitting outside for that long. It reminds me of the old joke where someone’s throne breaks on erev Pesach, so he goes out the morning of biur chometz and buys a new one, like he has nothing better to do that day, and he’s standing in the elevator, bringing it up to his apartment, and someone else comes into the elevator, and says, “Boy! There are new Pesach chumras every year!”
But how do you get rid of the old one? What did Achashveyrosh do?
He probably kept the old one in his basement.
But in our case, this is the one from our basement.
For years now, the throne in our basement has been running at random times. And often my wife is the only one who hears it. It drives her crazy. She’ll stop in the middle of conversations and say, “The water is running again.” And we’ll all stop to listen so we can agree that it is in fact running, or that someone has to leave the conversation to fruitlessly take a look at it.
I’ve tried to fix it, by which I mean that I’ve opened the tank and peered inside, but one of its problems is that there is this hose in the tank that keeps getting loose and twisting itself to point at the top of the tank. So you have to open it a certain way and grab the hose, or else you get a shower.
We’ve bought a couple of pieces that we thought might fix it, but this throne is older than any technology they seem to sell nowadays. We have no idea how old it is, except that it was here when we moved in, and it was old even then. It’s ancient, from like Persian times.
And it’s not like two people can look and put their heads together on the issue, because it’s a very tight room down there. It’s not actually legal to have a basement lavatory in Passaic, I’ve heard, so I guess the way someone who lived here before us got around this law was by just not putting in a sink. So you can use the facilities, but you can’t wash your hands. Though you actually can wash your hands, because there’s a shower. There’s also a laundry sink down there, but people don’t always figure that out until after they’ve washed their hands in the shower.
But it’s the only lavatory in our house besides the upstairs one. We have no ground floor lavatory, which is not good for when boys come to pick up our daughter for dates. We have to either send them upstairs so they can run into all the kids we’ve sent up there, or send them downstairs to see if they can figure out to use the laundry sink. Thankfully, no boy so far has needed it, which is weird, because some of them have driven two hours to get here. And they’re anyway waiting for my daughter to pretend she’s still getting ready. But no, they’d rather make awkward conversation with us.
MY WIFE: “Do you hear the water running?”
HIM: “What?”
My wife doesn’t want a new one. She’d rather we fix the old one. She kept asking our son to look at it. Our son Daniel has been apprenticing with a plumber part time to see if that’s what he wants to be when he grows up. His teachers always said, “If you don’t pay attention in school, you’re going to have to be a plumber,” but they forgot to say that plumbers get $200 just to show up. Whereas teachers do not get $200 to show up. When plumbers show up, people say, “Thank goodness you’re here!” My students don’t say that when I show up.
Anyway, Daniel kept insisting that we replace it. But he also wants to replace everything we have that’s still usable, including the garbage can. In fact, he told me just yesterday, “We need a new can.” So I said, “The can has been like that for years.” And he said, “No, I ran over it.” So I replied, as a joke, “You ran over our can?!” And he said, “Are you OK?” And then I ran outside and said, “Eh, it looks about the same.”
The truth is I did replace it. I bought a new can ages ago. We currently have 8 cans in total, and we can easily get by with fewer, except Pesach time. But we can’t get rid of the old one, apparently, so we might as well keep putting it out every week. It’s not going anywhere otherwise.
So he replaced the throne. He did it while everyone was out, and I came home from work to find an old throne in the dining room, propped up against the wall next to my chair. Which is where it is as I write this.
I was talking to my son Heshy, who’s in yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael but likes being apprised of any news in our house, so I told him the situation, and he said, “Oh, so now we have a ground-floor bathroom!”
Yeah, that’s good for shidduchim.
Anyway, my point here is that the one thing about saving money on installing a new throne that I didn’t think of is that no one’s schlepping it away. I have to figure out how to get rid of it. Apparently, the part of the job he doesn’t seem to have learned yet is how to make the old stuff disappear. I think he leaves before that part of the day. He’s only part time.
Though as I’m writing this, it is almost Purim. So maybe I should put up a sign saying that it goes to whomever has the best idea for a Purim prank involving an old throne.
I probably should take it apart—leave it in two pieces on the ground. Or I could smash it with a sledgehammer and leave it on our front lawn. And passersby will be like, “What did they do to break this?”
We’re in shidduchim; there’s no good way to get rid of it. Maybe this is why my wife didn’t want a new one. So what should I do? Find a dumpster in the middle of the night? What dumpsters do even I know of? Besides the one at my yeshiva. Speaking of pranks.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.