Good Intentions

After my two sisters and I were grown, Mother got a toy poodle that she named Jacques. Why a toy poodle, I don’t remember. While we were at home dogs were not allowed in the house, except for the occasional few nights when a new puppy joined our family. It might have been Daddy’s first cousin EJB’s third wife who talked Mother into a poodle. I can hear MLB, sipping a cocktail—she and EJB always brought their own booze because Mother and Daddy didn’t really drink—and taking a long draw on her king-size, filtered, menthol cigarette, pronouncing the breed’s name…”pooh-tell”. Like Roger Clemens claimed in his Senate interrogation last winter, I could be misremembering. It matters not because what I’m really reminded of is Jacque’s good intentions during his season of house breaking. Mother had been advised to put newspaper down on the kitchen linoleum floor for when Jacque’s needs arose indoors. Sometimes when he went to the newspaper to relieve himself, his little white furry paws would be responsibly planted on the paper, but his tee-tee went smack on the linoleum—E for effort.

Like young Jacques some 40 odd years ago, sometimes the good intentions of we humans miss the mark. Recently, as I sat outside the coffee shop, I watched the guy who takes care of emptying the waste receptacles and watering the flowers thriving in large ceramic containers in this part of a large commercial center. He was a friendly guy whose first language obviously is not English. This was unscientifically confirmed when I overheard him on his cell phone speaking fluent Spanish in rapid-fire fashion. Of course, any foreign language sounds rapid fire to a non-speaker. He went about his work systematically, pulling the liner from all of the trash containers before placing clean liners in them.

The container in front of the coffee shop sat vulnerable for a time while people continued dropping trash from their vehicles into the unlined container—good intentions, yes, except for moist, sticky waste. I suppose that at some point someone will face the job of scrubbing out these containers. I guess it just goes with the territory. Perhaps the kitchen garbage cans of some of these folks are caked with who knows what because trashcan liners don’t cross their radar screen. And no doubt, future-encrusted waste is far better in an unlined trash container than littered along the roadways, especially my roadway.

At home in rural Leon County, Texas, our county road is a target for everything—spent bags and containers from any number of fast food places, unwanted parts of out of season deer carcasses, any season wild hog carcass remnants, worn out tires, lots of beer cans, entire empty cases of beer, bags bursting with trash. Hello, God-fearing, conservative-voting Leon County. Unfortunately, there are no good intentions expressed in the garbage disposed of along County Road 456. The spirit expressed there is well illustrated in the story of the papa dog explaining to his son why he raises his leg on every tree in the yard. “Well son,” he says, “if you can’t eat it or fuck it, piss on it”. So there you have it.

Unlike dogs, who know no better by instinct, and left to their own would pee on any floor at any time at any point in their lives, humans, especially those driving the BMWs, Lexuses, Subarus, and even cars of lesser pedigree that populate this parking lot every day, most likely have been taught differently. I guess it’s my Virgo personality that prevents me from dropping a paper cup half filled with cream and sugar laced java into a bare waste container. Do I remember my Virgo mother tossing a wadded up Dentyne wrapper through the window of her Blazer? And didn’t I scold her for littering? Maybe that happened earlier in our lives before lots of us became mindful of trash along the roadways, around the time that litter campaigns called us to awareness.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions—so say the more hard-nosed among us, those who likely should sweep under their own doormats for all kinds of evidence of some sort of guilt. Perhaps a lot of us are in trouble with the Judge, in spite of our good intentions. I doubt that we’ll ever get that settled. What we can do is take another collective hard look in the mirror. Go on and love me until it hurts. Discipline me for my own good. Give me lots of opportunities to observe the well-intentioned behavior of others falling short of the mark. Bring it on. Finally, though, remind me that we’re all responsible for keeping the same boat on course and in reasonable order. Just help me keep on paying attention.

Good Intentions—Santa Fe New Mexico (July 8, 2008)

R. Harold Hollis