Dump caper helps trash reputation

People (well, an editor) asked about the dumbest thing I ever did. Other than getting married, it would have to be the Sharon Rubbish Caper.

We were a lace curtain Irish family in the West Roxbury section of Boston with pretensions of grandeur. So, in the early 1960s, we packed up and moved to a split-level ranch in the allegedly tony town of Sharon, about 27 miles outside the city limits. I felt like we were in Kansas, or someplace.

During college, I worked at a Boston newspaper that employed about 300 single women, so even I could get a date. One Saturday night, I begged my father for the use of his Buick (more pretensions) to squire some lovely about Boston, probably to some suitable obscure Ionesco play (talk about pretensions) where the whole cast performed in rubbish barrels. He said sure, If you go to the dump first.

One of the many, many drawbacks to moving to the Prairie was the lack of weekly visits by rubbish trucks. You had to take your own trash to the dump, for heaven’s sake. There wasn’t enough time to go the dump, then come back to shower, slather with Old Spice and get to Boston on time. So I decided to get ready, then go to the dump on the way out of town.

I would guess that Motown music was playing on the Buick radio when I drove up to the town dump, only to find out that it had closed an hour earlier. Now I was really out of time. Let’s face it – the date was the most important thing. So I drove a mile down the dump road to what I considered a vacant lot. This was years before we ever heard the word “ecology.” I took the bags of rubbish, dumped them in the field and sped off.

The next morning, the Sharon police were at the door. My parents, now, considered themselves sophisticated, upscale suburbanites and did not appreciate the police at the door, for any reason. My mother answered the door and was told by the twentysomething police officer than someone had dumped our rubbish on someone’s lawn.

Let’s digress.

You have to know Julia Twomey O’Meara to understand how close this poor devil was to a premature and painful death. My mother is now 91 and is so feisty that she has been named the head of the complaint committee at her nursing home. You can only imagine what she was like 30 years ago. When she bought a fatty roast at the First National Stores, she would cut the fat off and bring it back for a refund – and get it. She was a telephone operator at Jordan Marsh and always was assigned the toughest, most irate customers. She was tough as nails and lived for personal slights, both real and imagined.

Just as her finely honed sense of outrage was gearing up, I stepped between the parties to save the cop’s life. He only had a gun and club to face my mother. I walked him away from the house and quietly explained that I might have some knowledge about the situation. He said I could go clean it up and the matter would be dropped as long as my mother left him alone.

I returned to the crime scene in a heavy rain, praying to God that no one came by to see me. The rubbish was left in some bramble bushes that tore at my hands as I picked it up, item by soggy item. It took a lot longer to pick it up than drop it. There must have been 25 soggy letters with our name and address, which cut down the investigation time for the Sharon Police Department to solve the rubbish caper.

Naturally the neighbors found out why the police were at the house. This was a small, small town. Our suburban reputation was instantly ruined, only a few weeks after moving in. Years later, I realized that this was the plot for the funny movie and song “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Some 30 years later, Julia Twomey O’Meara still isn’t laughing.