The Midas Touch

Today I had planned on taking another load to the dump from our basement cleaning the other day. “No problem!” I thought. While Anna went shopping I could just load the truck up with junk and sacks of junk and drive to the county dump – actually it is not what you would think of as a dump – it is a large building with several huge bulldozers moving around pushing the garbage towards a huge compacter. The kind of thing James Bond would tried to escape from before it compacted him.

People back their vehicles into the big building, toss their garbage into the giant pile and the bulldozer operators and the compacter do the rest.

Outside the building they have on a big pedestal a scrunched up automobile, a big car, I think, like a Cadillac, not too much bigger than a case of Kleenex.

So, I was throwing sacks into the bed of the truck and noticed white seeping from under the tailgate onto the driveway. Evidently, we put an old gallon of aged paint in the garbage when we were cleaning up and when I slung the sack on the truck the lid came off. It had to be about half of a gallon can, but it appeared a ten gallon bucket turned over. There was paint all over the place. Trying to get in and remove the sack I got paint all over my hands, arms, the truck, my shoes, and all.

I drove the truck over into the grass and hosed out the bed. Luckily enough it was latex paint and most of it flowed away with the water.

Then I took the truck to a pressure wash car place and spent $8 in quarters trying to hose all the paint out of the bed…. Which when it was wet it looked like it was on gone, but now that it dried there are white streaks in my truck’s lining – and on the driveway, the grass, the border grass, the water faucet, and anything I had much as looked at.

Woe is me.