Garbage Night

You probably hate garbage night. I do. But Olga loves garbage night. Taking out le garbaj, to her, doesn’t mean going outside, hauling cans to the curb and tying up bags. It means going outside and ringing my doorbell to tell me that I need to do it. And then supervising, or more like coaching, me from the front stoop.

It’s a weekly ritual– after she’s rung the bell, down in the hallway I’ll usually find her shaking a big black bag while hollering in her quaking, half delirious state, “you do de gaaabidge??” She’ll often do this the moment the sun sets the night before pickup, but if I’m not home, she’ll tuck the bag between handrail rungs in the staircase, and then do it all over again with the doorbell at 6am the next morning.

Olga is amazingly diligent with the garbage, despite the fact that she has trouble remembering my name or other simple things like where the grape jelly belongs (I once found it on her bedside table). Alzheimer’s is a really curious condition–it’s wiped out the majority of her life’s memories but also causes her to get stuck in certain memory loops and routines. She’s got her garbage ritual, she’s got a cauliflower ritual, and she also has a ritual of waking up at 10 o’clock every single night, and basically sleepwalking out into the hallway with her walker and nightie to make sure the hallway light is off and the front doors are locked.

She’s lived in Granny Mansion the longest– 50+ years– so I think she still has a deeply ingrained sense of duty to household responsibilities. Because she’s too frail to work in the garden and too forgetful to cook now (she’s almost burned the house down one too many times), her responsibilities come down to garbage reminders and the locks on the doors. Fair enough for an 89-year-old.