I’ve been going to the park every morning, first thing, new routine. I was listening to two scientists talk about the effect sunlight has on our physiology and whatnot, and so without getting all sciencey and boring, I’m doing my own longitudinal study to gauge the effects of a morning blast of sunlight. So be it.
The upshot is that I’ve been starting the day in the park, by the lake, with ducks, and crows, and pigeons, and runners, and dogwalkers, babywalkers, and walkers. There’s a fountain, and willows, and water reeds, and grassy areas and sculptures.
There are many benches from which to choose, with different orientations and different views. There’s a table where one can sit and write comfortably in a notebook and so sometimes I do that, too.
Maybe the scientists should study the effect of those things along with the sunlight, because what I’ve learned is that this time in the park is the bees knees.
I make my coffee and take it with me and drink it from a little mug, which after a few days I traded for a tiny cup that says this:
Yesterday I stood in line at the recycling machine and there was a drunk man ahead of me, but not so drunk that he couldn’t compose himself or a sentence. More like, perpetually drunk, face that pinkish-gray color.
Recycling machine?
Yes, see, when you buy stuff here in Hungary, mostly liquids that come in glass, metal, or plastic containers, the price of those items includes a 50 forint deposit. 50 forints is about 15 cents. So you take your recycling to the machine from time to time and feed the machine your bottles and cans. You get a receipt that you can cash in at the register, or you can use the handy app and have your refund deposited straight into ye olde bank account.
But get this: it’s a bit of a Narnia machine, because what looks like some kind of vending machine is actually a gateway to a whole world of material management. If the hole through which you feed your items is the mouth, then this mouth has a tongue replete with swallowing mechanism in the form of a swift moving conveyor belt that shoots down an esophagus so deep that you can’t see its terminus.
Somewhere just inside the orifice is a scanner that immediately detects whether or not a morsel is a part of the deposit program. Feed it a bottle from, say, some small artis-anal winery, and the machine will quickly regurgitate the bottle for you to dispose of elsewhere. It’s wonderfully precise.
And what’s more, once an item is accepted, it rockets down the throat of the machine toward one of its many stomachs, before FWING! some armature fwings the container into its proper sorting receptacle. Cans crunch, bottles shatter, plastic crinkles.
My grocery store is near a transit hub, so there’s a trick to the timing when you visit the machine, because it has, well, rush hours. And the rush hours are mandated by the people who wander the streets, collecting recyclables in large plastic bags. There's a rhythm to when these folks show up to cash in their haul. Morning, but not too early, is bad. Lunch time, pretty safe. Late afternoon, another rush. You can imagine what a few such folks, with Santa Claus-ish sacks a-shoulder, will do to the flow of the line.
Yesterday was a rainy day, so I thought it might be an even better time. Heavy rain would surely diminish collection activities. I wasn’t wrong. When I got to the store, there were only three people ahead of me – R1, R2, and R3, let's say – and none had gargantuan collection bags.
R1 was finishing up.
R2 was chatting with R3, but R3 seemed reluctant to engage, because R2 was the aforementioned drunk.
When R1 finished, R2 let R3 go ahead of him, for no good reason aside from an apparent indifference to time. R3 began feeding the machine.
So I stepped forward, aligning myself with R2, who I will now call the Polish man, lest I set up the expectation of some kind of R2D2-type quip, for which there will be no payoff. Plus, in a few moments I would learn he was Polish. As soon as I was next to the Polish man, he waved me forward, too. He mumbled something I couldn't understand.
I smiled, then he said, “You speak English?”
“A little,” I said.
“Why I let him go ahead and you too? Because we all have the same time before we die. This I believe.”
I’m editing a bit and will continue to do so, because the Polish man – hell, let’s call him Piotr – Piotr was the type to repeat himself as a manner of emphasizing the most important bits. Which was every other bit. So the real comment was this:
“Why I let him go ahead and you too? Because we all have the same time before we die. The same time before we die. The same time. This I believe.”
I smiled and nodded. In the first few moments I was measuring him to see if he was the type of drunk who might flash from affable to irate, but I gauged him not to be so. Plus, there were many people in the vestibule of the Lidl (the line was growing) and I could move more swiftly and deftly than Piotr, no doubt. Low risk situation.
Anyway, I smiled and nodded and said, “probably so.”
“Yes,” he said, then continued, “on the streets they tell me that the Polish and the Hungarians are like brothers,” and he interlocked his hands like the Boys & Girls Club of America logo.
“I am Polish,” he said. “And in Hungary, I get everything I need.”
Piotr was good about respecting my personal space, except in those moments of emphasis when he would lean forward and give me a blast of his breath that smelled precisely like human waste. Henceforth I followed his movements and leaned back when he leaned forward. That helped, somewhat.
“I have an addiction to alcohol,” he said with no shame or misgiving whatsoever. Just as one might declare, I have red hair and freckles. “I drink every day, six liters of wine. Six."
He paused and quickly counted six on his fingers. Exclamation point, you see.
"In the morning, in the day, and in the night. Six. And it’s all from this,” he held up his bag of recycling, and smiled as if he was sharing the secret of life’s meaning, so simple, right under our nose all the time.
“Everything I need, from this. I came to Budapest in January with nothing and I drink six bottles of wine every day, all from this." He shrugs, no big deal.
"People throw a lot away. Really a lot. You would be amazed. Everything I have, I got from the street. From the garbage."
He surveyed his clothing.
“This,” he pinched the fabric of his black tank top and tugged it away from his chest. "From the garbage."
“This,” he did the same to his black shorts.
“These,” he picked his left foot up, then the right.
“All from the street. Everything. I find everything on the street.”
I wasn’t sure what I could add to the conversation but I was also realizing that probably didn’t matter.
“I find beer, wine, vodka, really everything. What people throw away.”
In the corner of my eye I could see R3 finish the feeding his recyclables into the machine, and he pushed the button to receive his voucher ticket. But the machine was out of paper, which it announces with a very loud Beep. I know the Beep. We all know the dreaded Beep. The Beep halts the flow and invokes the same expression, no matter who is at the front of the line. Every time, their face says,
“I was almost there. I almost made it. And now this.”
The people stuck in line shift on their feet and scan the store entrance, look at each other. Everyone is at the mercy of a store clerk who will hear the Beep, at some point, and then retrieve a new roll of receipt paper, and come install it in the machine. This rarely happens quickly.
So the Beep started, R3 assumed the expression, and I told Piotr,
“I’m going in.”
I had a very small amount of recycling, and I was not interested in engaging in this collective stasis for an undetermined amount of time. I can be impatient. There, I said it. Plus, I felt I had given Piotr just the right amount of graceful audience and he seemed to think so, too, because he said,
“You go in?”
“I go in.”
“OK,” he said, and smiled, and I smiled, and that was that.
When I emerged from the store eight minutes later, Piotr was gone. The line for the machine was now snaking out the door, so I went home with my groceries and my bag of recycling lived to fight another day…
