Collecting Cans

My dad has always been what you would call a hands-on kind of guy. I suppose in a way you could say that my dad’s hands define who he is; they reflect what kind of life that he has lived. The most notable feature of his rounded (that is where Andy inherited his stubbiness from, well that and the fact that my parents kept him in the root cellar for one summer) hands was the fact that they were as hard and dense as bedrock. This toughness came from years of manual labor as well as years of conditioning his skin with products such as Chevron’s regular unleaded gasoline. Once clean and pale hands have taken on a gray, dingy hue. This is not to say that his soul is tough and spotted, but just the opposite. My dad has always given his all to everything he has ever done, and that includes parenting.
We liked money. One of dad’s favorite things to do was to ride bikes, so he came up with a plan that would appease both sides. He was going to have us collect cans. He planned to take us on bike rides after work riding in the alley ways of downtown Bountiful, and searching all of the town’s known giant sanitary waste receptacles. We would then take the cans that we had collected throughout the week and redeem them for money at the aluminum recycling truck that would come on Wednesdays at a nearby strip mall called 5 Points.
Our uniforms and tools were essential to the job, they were the difference between making enough to buy penny candy, and baseball cards, or just penny candy. With some baskets, some wheels, and a welder my dad also invented some carts that my brother and I could pull behind our bikes and fill full of cans. Dad fashioned Andy and I some pretty styling necklaces each of which displayed a large, beautiful magnet that could be used to find aluminum, or to woo young beautiful maidens on our days off. These necklaces went well with our custom made cycling hats. My mom was a seamstress and as she was concerned for our safety she made us cycling hats covered in reflectors, helmets were not yet considered safe. As later scientific research would prove hardness actually was more effective on keeping your melon in a non-squished state in the event of a head-on collision than was brightness, comfort, or style. Even so, we didn’t seem to need helmets as we understood that when a car was coming, we were to get out of the way, a skill that has somehow skipped a generation.
To inspect the troops before we set out mom decided to put us in a dark room and shine a flashlight on us.
“Nope, not good enough,” she declared.
“Onery,” Andy whispered in my ear.
“I heard that boy,” Mom said as she grabbed Andy by the wrist with one hand and yanked him out into the hallway next to the phone booth. Before we both knew what was happening Andy was in tears and I was laughing hysterically.
“That’s enough Bryan! This paddle is just warming up and you’re next if you think your brother’s misery is so funny,” cackled Mom. We both knew when we had been bested and we fell quickly back into the ranks of strict obedience that in the early 1980’s only physical pain could command.
Off we went to Main Street to purchase some reflective vests. Once dad had added a few more reflectors to our bikes and trailers mom finally declared that we would be cleared to begin our careers as entrepreneurs the next day. The morning at last arrived and from sunup Andy and I waited patiently sitting on our bikes until 4:00 that afternoon when our dad would finally get home. If nothing else came out of this whole experience, we learned that sitting on our bikes all day would definitely leave its literal mark on us in the form of an unbearable case of “chub rub.” If it had only been physical pain we would have both gotten over our misfortunes fairly quickly; however, during the next few days Andy and I both were to be labeled as being frequent marker sniffers due to our strange behavior. The other students in our class just could not understand why we chose to stand next to our desks all day instead of sitting like the rest of the class.
After my dad got home from work and Andy and I had reinforced our padding with layers of Vaseline and left over quilt batting; we were at last ready. With my dad in the lead, equipped with his car radio hooked up to a car battery that he had attached to his bike, and us following with our reflective gear and homemade carts; we looked more like something off the Red and Green show rather than a father and his two boys out for a leisurely bike ride. To Andy and me it did not matter what we looked like because we were off to make millions, and even more importantly we were with our dad.