A Man Himself Is Junk

A conversation between two old junk collectors:

Junior Bear

A man himself is junk, and all his life he clutters the earth with it. He carries junk around with him wherever he goes, and wherever he stops he accumulates it. He lives in it. He loves it. He worships it. He collects it and stands guard over it.

—William Saroyan, Rock Wagram (1952)·

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    Jack E. Wardlow III You have been prowling through my barn haven't you?

    
    
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    Junior Bear I got some too. What you got to trade? Once a month OKC has a big junk pickup day when you put any kind of stuff you don't want on the curb. In point of fact it is actually OKC's junk exchange day. We put our bad junk out and roam around picking others good junk up. It is an amazing unintentional recycling program.

    
    
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    Jack E. Wardlow III That is exactly what I would do, try to beat the city truck to eveyone's pile...

    
    
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    Junior Bear

    It really is fascinating. It is almost a dance. I'm slow, so I take things to the curb one at a time. So I take something out, say, that is aluminum, then I go back for more. I come back and the first thing is gone. It has been picked up by a Metals Picker. So then I put down a little wagon load of 2x4 ends and chunks of plywood. When I come back, that is gone. A Lumber Picker came by. In the Fall when I put out industrial size bags of leaves from my forest in my back-back yard, people stop and ask is that just leaves and then my leaves take off to someones mulch or compost pile acquired by Leaf Picker. Big chunks of tree limbs and sometime even piles of twigs attract the Wood Pickers (no jokes here please). Wood Pickers are not the same as Lumber Pickers. They pick wood to burn in their fire places, lumber is not good to burn indoors. We also have Rag Pickers, Glass Pickers, Magazine Pickers as opposed to Paper pickers, and the rarest of all, Knit Pickers looking for old wool stuff to unravel for the threads.
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    Jack E. Wardlow III I too have my share of knit pickers who are wool gatherers....

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