Wednesday is dumpster day
Every school morning, sis and I would leave the house and walk 3 blocks to Notre Dame Elementary, where we went to school. Every morning our route would take us past the place where men loaded their food trucks. My mom called them roach coaches. Doesn't that phrase whet the appetite?
These men would offload expired packaged food, take on fresh packaged food, and head off for their routes to feed hungry construction workers. Most days, the men would give the expired food to the line of homeless people waiting in the alley. (stale donuts and such, not rotten meat or anything)
Wednesday, however, was dumpster day. The manager would stand and watch while all that food went from the trucks to the dumpster. He would try to shoo off the homeless people by yelling at them. He would yell,"Get away from here! Get outta that dumpster! You're trespassing! I'm gonna call the cops!"
In the summertime, we would see them camped out in the alley waiting for the manager to go off-shift, while all that food rotted in the sun. There was a shift change at 11 o'clock, and the homeless people would help each other into the dumpster. We could hear the hollow echo of their voices coming from the dumpster, "This samwitch looks ok." or "Shit, all this crap's rotten."
By noon, they would have faded away to wherever homeless people go; but we would see them again at night staking out their turf, or riding the California (avenue) bus, which ran up and down our street until 2 am.
My sister and I started taking a longer route to school on Wednesdays. We would walk up California to Lynch, instead of taking Sidney Street and passing that dumpster.
When we walked across Lynch, we would pass the dairy, and once in a while we would see a young guy quietly "forgetting" a crate of fresh milk sitting by their dumpster. A few times this same guy would give milk to the students heading to school. It was a rare treat to have something filling in the morning, and my sister and I were afraid to press our luck by walking past too often. We understood he was breaking the rules and risking his job to feed hungry kids who's parents were trying to give their kids a decent education. A good education will take you a hell of a lot farther than a good meal, but there were a lot of nights where my mom said, "I'm not hungry, you girls eat up." to pay for the Catholic school I was fortunate enough to attend.
My mom taught me to find the good in everything. I saw a lot of harshness around me, and I saw a lot of good too. There was an unwritten code for my neighborhood. Children were protected from as much as possible. We roamed without fear. There were always strangers keeping an eye on us, keeping the predators at bay.