Page 4 - MidWeek - Jan 19, 2022

4 MIDWEEK JANUARY 19, 2022
WGetting Trashed
By Kelli Shiroma Braiotta
When do you take down your Christmas decorations?
hen I was a little kid, I marveled at the job of garbage collectors. And probably like many youngsters my age, I wanted to be one when
I grew up. There was something about these burly dudes lifting metal cans and emptying them into a truck that was the “Transformer” of our time.
Like firemen, they got to ride on the back and yell and whistle at the driver like they were on a stagecoach in the Old West. Even when I got older and their title changed to sanitation engineers, I still thought it would be a great job as you usually finished before noon and got paid quite a bit of money.
CRISTIAN BAYS
Student, Waipahu
“At the beginning of February, just to start off the new year happily and in hope that it’ll be better than the last.”
LAURIE KEENO
Retired Staff Attorney, Foster Village
“The weekend after New Year’s.”
NONI SLADE
Front Desk Guest Service Staff, Waimānalo
“Christmas decorations go up on Thanksgiving night and come down anytime late January.”
MICHELLE MURAKAMI
Professional Singer, Honolulu
“We like to keep the Christmas spirit a little longer, so we take our decorations down a week after Christmas.”
It wasn’t until I read a Ray Bradbury short story called The Garbage Collector that I had a change of heart for the occupation. Spoiler alert: It was about a garbage collector who loved his job but came home one day and told his wife he was going to quit his job. In short, they were told that if an atomic bomb was dropped, they would have to go out and collect all the dead bodies.
Still, I’ve always respected the occupation. To this day, I leave a case of beer out on our trash receptacle at Christ- mastime. Over the recent holidays, we accumulated an excessive amount of trash, and we never have enough room in our collection receptacle. Thank goodness my brother lives four houses away toward the main roadway and he usually has room in his can for me to use.
Ron Nagasawa
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Senior Staff Writer
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Has Humility Gone S Out Of Style?
omewhere along the way, it seems as though the traits of self-promotion and arrogance have become more important than the traits of
modesty and humility. Once a highly prized value, I sometimes wonder if humility has gone out of style. Even when I hear parents speak of what they hope for in their children, they talk about confidence, hap- piness and success — never about humility. To me, humility is a trait that inspires silent respect from others, and I’ve found that no matter how much we think we know, when compared to the magnificence of the universe we live in, what we really know is
only a drop in the ocean of life.
As C.S. Lewis said so well, “True humility is not
thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.”
alice@yourhappinessu.com
The problem is that post-surgery recovery means I can’t lift a lot of weight. To put it honestly, I feel like a wimp. The other week, I had two 42-gallon garbage bags full of trash to haul to my brother’s house.
I was determined to do this on my own, without asking my wife and daughter to help me. It was starting to get dark, which was good, as I had an idea. I took the stroller we bought for Buddy when we found out he was going blind. I loaded the lighter bag on top of it and pushed the stroller to my brother’s trash can. It worked like a charm, so I went back to pick up the heavier bag.
I was navigating a curb transition and lost control of the stroller. It started rolling on its own down the street and toward the main road. I ran after it but not before it tilted over in the middle of the main road and the garbage bag spilled over. Luckily, there were no cars so I scrambled to collect the spillage. That’s when an elderly woman waiting at a nearby bus stop who saw the overturned stroller started screaming, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Not thinking, I yelled back, “Don’t worry, it’s just garbage!”
I’m guessing that’s when she called HPD.
rnagasawa@midweek.com