Dinosaurs

I think I've mentioned before that I wake up when it is still dark outside. I like the quiet and stillness of that time, but it's not completely silent. Below my window and across the street are a row of the neighbor's trash-cans, and every day someone comes around 4:30 or 5 and roots through for plastics, cans and glass which he/she then puts into a metal shopping cart. It could be a lot noisier than it is, the trash can is propped open, the plastics get squeezed and flattened, the cans bang the bottles which then clink the cart, but most of the people who do this at this particular hour, I know there are more than a few, are pretty efficient. At other times of the day there are different breeds, like the drunks looking to scrape together a few coins who bend sideways and reach in up to their shoulders, or the Asian grandparents who work as a team, with plastic gloves and surgical masks. But these early workers are different. My friend calls them dinosaurs: roaming the earth slowly and methodically, they are heavy, weighted in every possible way, doomed to extinction.