cherry pick

I'm constantly reminded of things I have that my students do not.

As I type this, I am on an airplane headed back to Richmond from a wonderful, life-giving weekend in Seattle. I took pictures in the sky because I know my students would be interested in what the world looks like outside a plane window.

Many of my students have never been outside Richmond. The few who have usually go somewhere to visit family or, on occasion, shop outside the city for their birthday or Christmas.

On a field trip last year to local community colleges, a high school senior in the back of my car shrieked in terror at the sight of cows grazing on a hill by the freeway.

"What are those animals doing on that hill?!"

I calmed her and assured her that the cows were fine on the hill and that they were just eating. I used the same explanatory tone as I would for a three year old venturing outside the city for the first time in her conscious life. This student was nineteen.

By the time I was nineteen, I had visited Mexico, England, France, and Italy. I had gone skydiving and drove my own car. I had pitched more than one fit on the premise that my $20 per week allowance was too low.

To be fair to myself, I was a teenager living in a relatively affluent community. According to my parents, I was pretty polite as far as teenagers go.

My kids, on the other hand, live in a very different bubble. In this bubble, everything is completely different than anything I have ever experienced.

I truly believe it is dramatically different than anything most of America has experienced.

After I moved to Richmond, I was surprised to feel culture shock. Obviously it would be different than the cities where I have lived and attended college, but I didn't know how different. It is not unusual to drive by the bloated corpses of household pets in the street on my way to work. I drove by a long deceased pit bull for half a week before I started alternating my route, unable to handle the sight.

The streets are in disrepair and are littered with debris. After a windy night, it looks like a hurricane has passed through a dumpster outside a Taco Bell -- food wrappers, small toys, and candy wrappers are everywhere. Before work each morning, I pick up the debris that has found its way into my yard over the course of the night. The list of bizarre material I find has become sort of a Ripley's Believe It Or Not catalogue in my mind.

The list includes:

• A box of empty otter pops
• A rubber porkchop
• A loaf of bread
• A rooster (living)
• A raccoon (dead)
• Various matchbox cars
• An "Ask Abby" article clipped from a 1980 San Francisco Chronicle
• Various beer bottles buried n my garden

And much more.

At first, I was shocked by the litter and debris. I was reminded of a third world country nestled in the San Francisco Bay. My displeasure with my surroundings came to a head one evening as I was driving some of the senior boys home from one of heir asketball games. We had stopped at Jack N The Box for dinner, and, at a stop sign, Armani decided it would be the perfect occasion to discard his trash outside the car. I heard a liquidy plunk as a half-full orange soda began its slow course down the gutter. The other boys in the car threw out their empty burger wrappers after Armani’s drink.

Having gone to college in Santa Cruz, I was obviously floored. I’m not too terribly involved in the environment, nor have I been, but I certainly cringe whenever I see a cigarette butt fly out of a car window. The sight of half a dozen fast food wrappers leaving my car was too much to bear.

“What are you doing? Go get those and wait for a trash can. You can’t just throw things outside the car.”

“Why not?”

I sputtered for a minute, never having gotten this far in my environmental logic chain.

“Be--because it’s bad for the environment.”

“The environment? Ms. Layfield, with all due respect, do you see any trees out here?”

I looked up. I saw two pairs of tennis shoes tossed over a telephone line. I saw a couch with sagging cushions slumped against a mailbox. There was a flocked and tinseled Christmas tree long forgotten between two houses, like some kind of shirked responsibility embodied.

What I should have said was, “Haven’t you heard of the broken window theory?”

What I should have said was, “Don’t you have pride in your city?”

What I should have said was, “This is how Richmond gets to look like this.”

What I did was this: I closed the car door, dropped the rest of the boys off, then, when I was alone, came back to collect the trash. I don’t know why I came back for it; it seems ridiculous to cherry pick the Jack in the Box trash from the rest of the garbage in the gutter.

I did it anyway.