Garbage Pickers

I come from very poor beginnings but both my mother and grandfather worked.  No-one I ever knew, even people poorer than my family, were garbage pickers.  My first glimpse of people raiding the trash was one early morning at my house when I saw someone pulling a cart up to mine and my neighbors recycling boxes.  He/she (I can't remember) took only cans...pop cans or beer cans.  I was a little shocked and felt quite sorry for the person to be needing money that badly.

Living in this apartment building, I see a lot of this done now.  Each time it has been a man pushing a grocery cart very early in the morning and raiding our recycling bins for pop or beer cans.  I'm not sure if it's the same man each time but he is always neatly dressed and doesn't look like a street person.  Again, my heart goes out to him and I feel guilty for my own good fortune.

This afternoon I was relaxing out on the balcony when I heard a loud clatter of bottles banging against each other.  It sounded like someone was walking through my parking lot with a bag of bottles.  I remained in my chair but could see a man walking out of my parking lot and down into the grassy area of the ravine.  He was carrying quite a few bags as he crawled under the droopy leaves of a large tree becoming almost completely hidden as he scrambled about.  I thought that he might be a homeless person and that was his lair...thinking about it now, it could be!

He scrambled back out but now only carrying a couple of bags, having left the noisy bags with bottles deep under the tree.  He walked back to my apartment recycling bins and a couple of others I could see but it didn't look like he was able to find anything.  I would describe him as small and thin, maybe in his late 50's, dressed in drab but not ragged clothes.  He had no grocery cart so it might be a completely different man than the one I saw previously.

I feel very sorry for his plight and don't mind one bit that he makes a few dollars from our recycling bins but I do have one concern now.  I'm a little worried he's camping out under that tree.  And I wonder how many other people in this great city of mine is so down and out that they are living their lives in the same way.

We all have a picture in our heads of people who live on the streets and we think they all look like bums.  This man did not look that way.  Poverty seems to have a much different face than what I had thought.

Like I said, my family was poor but we lived in a clean apartment and ate well cooked meals.  I guess I never really knew what true poverty was because I thought it was only living on low incomes.  Street poverty, where someone has to raid dumpsters or recycling bins in order to survive, is a brand new reality for me.

There, but for the grace of whoever, go you or me.