Here’s another thing about Monday. Monday is trash pickup day. Not on my street, but on the streets I can’t avoid in order to escape from my street. And it’s not just a garbage truck, but a recycle truck and a yard waste truck as well. There is hardly a Monday when I don’t have to sit and thrum my fingers on the steering while as I wait for a big truck to make a nine-point Y-turn on a narrow street, or to lumber around in several directions trying to back into a driveway.

Obviously, I’m all in favor of trash being picked up on a regular basis, and the reuse of whatever can be reused (as well as the mulching of what can be mulched). It makes a lot of sense in a world with too much stuff in it already. But didn’t garbage trucks use to run their routes early in the morning, even before the milkman got up? Since when do they clog up the neighborhood at noon? And on a Monday, at that.

Of course, I’m not complaining, because I never complain. (Cough.) It’s just one more thing I have to deal with on your typical Monday, a day I would always choose to stay home and hibernate if I had that option. It just always seems like asking for trouble to venture out on a Monday.

The book I mentioned in the last entry is The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee. I recently read an older novel of his, Aloft, which I loved because it's all about friends and family and changing relationships over time. This new one is more about strangers coming together, and how their relationships develop. It jumps back and forth (the first half anyway) between 1939 and 1945 and 1953 and 1986, where most of the action takes place. It’s hard to explain why I like it, because the characters deal with war and disease and death, but the writing is exquisite. Sometimes a phrase can make you look at the world differently, and Lee's books are full of phrases and sentences and paragraphs that do that.