Black bagger therapy

Hi, my name is Mongo, and I'm a black bagger (read the book, really!)

This is my story.

I used to only occassionally pick through bags of trash that my DH had set aside to put out. It was a rather harmless passtime, more curiousity about what he saw no value in. In befuttlement that accompanies this sort of activity I'd pull out stubs of pencils, wads of unused, though slightly crumpled loose leaf pages, interesting articles I'd given him to read, and the odd bits of yarn, wrapping paper, seed packets, and miscallaneous doodads.

"These things are all useful!" I'd shriek. "They're usable and have a lot of life!"

In his defence he'd start questioning me "When'd you ever use this? Those are useless bits of scrap. What could you possibly do with them?" usually ending up with some uncontestable fact like "they smell funny".

I'll admit it. He won a few. I conceided a few. The bottom line is though, I've come across more useful stuff, going through the garbage can, OUR garbage can.

It's been an insightful learning opportunity, though one that I prefer doing farther away from home.

This weekend, I found myself teathered to pickings closer to home, and boy, am I glad I did. My DH decided that with the long weekend he'd tidy up.

In all the years that we've been together, he doesn't realize what a super sized button this is. (My older sister tidied my room when I was 14, an event I still regret.)

This weekend, my guts (and curiousity) prompted me to check a black bag he'd taken to the curb. Toys! Toys! Good toys! It didn't matter that the children have seriously lost interest in the items. He threw them out! I continued to rifle through the bag, and pulled out three inches of important papers (that I'd no idea were there, but they were important none the less) and made various piles: Keep, Keep, and Saint Vincent de Pauls. (Clean Sweep has nothing on me!)

After the walk down memory lane, I took a tumble through the recyling bins to see what other gems were calously cast aside. What was this? A tube. Oh genie, what's in the tube? The Andy Gibb posters of my youth? Oh no, nothing as important as that, he claimed in his defence.

Just my Masters degree.