1-Sept-99 Trash picking by bicycle
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I spotted it as I was coming up Blake Street on my way home -- a 24 x 36 poster, Van Gogh in Arles, in a modular frame, put out for the trash. It's mostly sky and water, with one of those counterweighted drawbridges. I only got two houses past it before I said, shucks, it's a Van Gogh, hung a U-ie, and took a closer look. Sure enough, they were moving and throwing it out. I must have been in a things-on-the-walls mood because of hanging up four things on Anne's apartment walls last night. Arlene and Charley have had me put a couple of dozen of their prints in the same kind of frame, so I knew where to strike with the screwdriver of my Swiss army knife. I had the frame in pieces, bungied to the bike, in short order. The print was mounted on cardboard so I couldn't roll it, and that was a problem. The glass and a backing piece of corrugated cardboard stayed behind.
I kept the bike in low gears and held the print in my right hand, mostly keeping it on the handlebars but sometimes just riding one handed. If you just use the front sprocket gear shift, the left hand one, a 21 speed bike is like your choice of seven different three speed bike gearings. I was in the next-to-lowest of those seven, and it was slow going but it worked. Surprisingly, the frame didn't slip out of the bungie at all.
People must have been looking at it. A guy waiting for the bus at the corner of Beacon and Centre had a brief conversation with me about it and the difficulty of riding with it, until the lights turned to 'walk'. I walked the next two short blocks, where the traffic was a little too complex to ride one handed. An oldish Asian woman looked at the poster with interest and asked, “You paint?” No, but I sure did laugh about it later. I guess she would think I'm ignorant for not being able to quote any Li Po poems.
After going out to the car dealership to finish the paperwork -- and it turns out that the car we're getting IS the car I saw and liked at the Arlington dealership -- we went back by car to get the glass from the poster frame. It's all back together now, good as new, and there's no piece of glass left out for the trash for anyone to get cut on.
Say, I'm changing my navigation so the up arrow below links to the current month instead of the whole journal. Just so you know.
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