I am reading a copy of Geez magazine when she steps onto the bus. I have seen her many times before but that doesn’t stop my heart from racing like a championship thoroughbred in a southern derby on a Sunday afternoon. Would this be the day I would find it in myself to speak to her or would she sit in the seat beside me and talk to me first?
I slump down in defeat as she takes a seat alone as she always does while the rest of the people on the bus stare their judgmental stares in her direction. They snicker and laugh mockingly as she stands up a couple of minutes later ready to get off at her stop.
Her posture was one that the hunchback of Notre Dame would be proud of. She is wearing a white “Gilligan” hat that is stained yellow to protect her head from the sun. She sports two big blotches of sunscreen below both eyes and wears grey wool socks over her pants that stretch up to her waste. She kind of looks like a 50 year old female version of Steve Urkel yet she is not a fictional teenager in a television sitcom but instead a real life heroine.
She spends her days walking up and down Springbank Avenue armed with a long stick with a nail through it cleaning up the garbage on the side of the road that litters the historic Springbank Park. It is a park that Londoners flock to when the rat race has gotten the best of them. It is a hotspot to picnic in during the weekends in the summer and is a place of refuge for both the young and old.
She does not receive payment from the City of London for her back breaking labour nor would I suspect she would expect any. She is ridiculed and mocked and most people harbor suspicions that she is crazy yet she is not crazy at all.
She just feels it is necessary to keep the park clean from the trash that threatens to suffocate it. It seems strange to me that people would brand the middle aged woman picking up the trash as crazy yet think nothing of the people who litter in the park in the first place.
She steps off the bus and wastes no time getting to work as she stabs a Tim Horton’s coffee cup and puts it into the garbage bag she holds in her other hand. Some people on the bus shake their head and ask out loud what her ailment is. I return to the Geez magazine and read about Exxon Mobile’s CEO, Rex Tillerman who presides over the biggest oil company in the world and subsequently is one of the world’s biggest polluters.
He is unapologetic for the destruction to the environment that his company has caused under his watch. He recently urged his shareholders to vote down a resolution from the California Public Employee Retirement System calling on the company to set goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Tillerman is what I like to call an “anti-human,” which is defined as a person who pollutes, endangers, steals, murders, rapes, robs, embezzles or lies for personal monetary or political gain. We need human beings to consume, spend and pollute less because of global warming concerns and he represents the anti-thesis of what we need to ensure our survival for generations to come.
The juxtaposition is impossible to ignore. Society hails Tillerman and men of his ilk as success stories; men who should be emulated for bringing in record profits no matter what the environmental consequences. Tillerman is worshiped by shareholders and business insiders who have made a pretty penny under his watch and has graced the cover of business magazines while the woman who walks up and down the road picking up garbage is ridiculed. If things seem backwards here it’s because they are.
There are unsung heroes in every town like the woman in this story who take it upon themselves to do laborious tasks expecting nothing in return. They do not wins awards or give acceptance speeches, their pictures are not pasted on magazine covers nor are they handsomely compensated for trying to make the world a better place. As long as our politicians continue to cozy up to big business and they continue to accumulate absolute power and operate above the law then in the end we will all be up picking up their garbage
Max De Luca is a freelance writer who lives in London, Ontario Canada. His short stories and articles have appeared in such publications as the Istanbul Literature Review, Inscribed Magazine and Mobius: A Journal for Social Change. He is influenced by the work of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Hunter S Thompson and Howard Zinn. Read other posts by Max De Luca.
