I was walking down Putnam Street the other morning... • In Case Of Actual Death

34 Notes

I was walking down Putnam Street the other morning and there was an orange Cambridge Public Works truck parked in the middle of the road. A guy in a reflective vest was using a shovel to scrape something dead off the road. Maybe an opossum? A house cat? Hard to tell. I slowed my walk and started doing the usual mental calculations about how I would perform if this was my job.

Surely you become inured to that sort of thing. It’s just a lump of molecules. It probably wasn’t even the first mashed tabby he’d scraped off the street that morning. He was making the world a better place, in a small way. At least for me. Of course you question which is the better world, the one where we don’t have to look at mushy dead roadkill or the one where it’s left to rot and fester as a warning to others. Although is there even any hard evidence to support heads-on-pikes as an effective deterrent to wrong-doing. Surely it ultimately all goes back to the economy.

When we sold our house we had to clean out our garage for the first time ever, and underneath the cardboard boxes and high chairs and sleds and curtain rods we found the body of a dead bird. Vague memories of a terrible, unidentified smell however far back. It had been laying there for who knows how long. I scraped it up with a snow shovel and carried it out to the back yard, dropping it in the weeds under the apple tree, a gift for the coyotes or possibly the people who were buying our house. But that was a bird mummy, the shell of what it had been.

I came alongside the man just as he got the blade wedged under the fox or small dog, and I was admiring the stoic manner in which he performed the indelicate task of dumping its still fresh entrails into a garbage bag—The Working Man! Performing the societal roles few of us even pause to think about, and with dignity and honor!—and as the bag of broken bones and bloodied fur flew through the air to land in the back of his truck the man yelled out, to no one, “UGH! SO GROSS!”