This vignette is written because it can’t help itself and carries with
it a hope that someone who reads it may know a little girl whose father
is a garbage man. Suppose that you can’t think of anyone just now who is
a daughter to a garbage man, it is best to read this just the same for
you never know when you may meet her.
When you do, tell her not to care too much when the children at
school tease her about her father and cry--“Phew--phew, here comes the
gar-bidge-Garrr-bidge-Garrr-bidge.” Tell her at that time to try and
sustain her personal integrity with philosophy. It won’t do her a
particle of good but tell her just the same.
Tell her that her father is a terribly useful man. That if he should
fail to function, then the disposal of garbage would become an
individual problem and that the mamas of kids whose fathers are not
garbage men would be obliged to say to their husbands--“Ed, dear, don’t
forget to take the garbage bucket to the public incinerator on your way
to the office.”
Tell her that just because her father collects dirt, it is no disgrace.
Tell her to look at the people in good standing who peddle dirt. Tell
her to look at the papers. Tell her to tell the world that it’s better
any day to collect than to peddle dirt.
Tell her that when her father, up on his great smelly throne, drives
around the corner of Powell and Geary that dressed-up folk needn’t
disdain him so much. He’s a sermon. They won’t like him as a sermon so
much as a garbage man but he’s a sermon just the same. The text is
that back of most things that are dainty and beautiful is the drudgery
worker. Tell her that there isn’t an immaculate kitchen in San Francisco
that doesn’t depend upon her father.
Nor a feast at the Palace or the St. Francis. Tomato skins and the nests
that cauliflowers come in, and gnawed “T” bones. What would become of
them if she had no father. And coffee grounds and the nameless things
that have been forgotten and burned by the absent-minded. Tell the
little girl about Omar Khayyam and how he might have said--.
Oh, many a charred secret into the garbage can goes That from the
kitchen range in blackened cloud once rose. Tell her that there is a
professor at Yale whose father was a junk man. All this and more tell
the garbage man’s little girl.