Many years ago, I heard the legendary folk singer, Pete Seeger, sing a song of his entitled “Garbage”, where he talks about how our oceans, rivers, skies, and even our minds, are filling up with “garbage, garbage, garbage”. He sang about when the landfills will all be full, and when the hydrocarbon haze will be with us to stay, and about when the stocks and bonds will have all become garbage, and when there will be no money to be made, only money to be repaid. But what really stuck with me from that song was the need to protect ourselves as best we can from all the garbage that accumulates inside our heads and starts pushing aside all the good stuff, as if it needs to be center stage, instead of safely locked away in what is left of our memory banks. Anyway, for some reason, I was talking to a longtime friend of mine the other day about all this, and our conversation went a little something like this:
“You know what my head is full of that I wish wasn’t in there?” my friend asked me.
“No, what?”
“Old baseball statistics.”
“You mean like how many home runs Babe Ruth hit?” I asked with a smile.
“Exactly,” he said, “714 by the way. And I also know Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average –.367, and how many strikeouts Walter Johnson had in his long career – 3,508, and how many hits Pete Rose had in his – 4,256. Thank heavens steroids came along and screwed everything up so bad that baseball statistics no longer mean a darn thing, otherwise I would probably still be filling my head with more of that kind of useless garbage. I also remember way too much stuff about old television shows from the 1950s and 1960s. Go ahead, ask me anything you want about old TV shows, and I will know the answer.”
“You mean like The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island?”
“Oh,” he said, “that’s just the tip of the iceberg! I’m talking The Munsters, McHale’s Navy, Green Acres, Get Smart, My Three Sons, Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Mister Ed, you name it. And don’t even get me started on the westerns, like The Rifleman, Bonanza, F Troop, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train and Maverick.”
“Wow,” I said, “you must have done some serious television watching when you were young! All I really know about those shows is that they made Mister Ed talk by putting peanut butter in his mouth, and that I had a huge crush on that very pretty girl that Dobie Gillis was always after. What was her name by the way?”
“Tuesday Weld,” answered my friend effortlessly, “and I think every red-blooded American teenage boy back in the 1960s had a crush on her! I know I sure did!”
As our conversation continued, I learned that my friend still watches endless re-runs of his favorite TV shows, The Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver. And he not only knows the TV names of every cast member, but he also knows their real names, too, which he proceeded to tell me.
“Well,” I finally told him, “If you know that Ellie Mae and Thelma Lou (Andy and Barney’s love interests on the show) were named Elinor Donahue and Betty Lynn in real life, then you do indeed have way too much Andy Griffith Show garbage in your head!”
“So, what about you, Daryl,” asked my friend. “What kind of garbage do you have locked in your head?”
“Well,” I said, “to tell you the truth, it’s pretty much all garbage up there nowadays, but I think the worst of it has to do with old quotes and sayings. I can’t even remember who most of them belong to anymore, or if I have added or detracted from some of them, but there’s more of them than I care to count.”
“Like what?” he asked with interest.
“Well, let’s see, `We are all in the gutter, but at least some of us are looking up at the stars’; and then there’s `Destiny is something we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental’; and `The gods envy us because we are mortal, because any moment may be our last, and that everything is more beautiful because we are doomed’. Oh, and this one by Hemingway; `The world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, it will kill you, too, but there will be no special hurry’.”
“Wow,” said my friend, “you are really carrying around some heavy garbage in that poor head of yours.”
“I know!” I exclaimed. “Oh well, at least some of it is profound.”
“Profound?” said my friend, smiling. “If you ask me, it’s just depressing! Don’t you have any happy garbage in your head?”