How blue was my recycling bin

On a recent Thursday afternoon I’m watching a movie on TCM — “The Drowning Pool,” starring Paul Newman — when I hear a big truck outside.

Without getting up I know from experience that it’s the folks from the recycling crew. They’re two days late. The city blames this on a lack of trucks, which it in turn blames on a problem with the supply chain. I accept this explanation, but I can’t help thinking that before long this will become a catchall excuse. (“Jimmy, your report card says you flunked math!” “Not my fault, Mom — supply chain problems!”)

I’ve seen “The Drowning Pool” a number of times; it’s a sequel to Newman’s film “Harper,” both films based on books by one of my favorites, Ross Macdonald. “Drowning Pool” isn’t as good as “Harper,” but it’s not bad, and as the truck passes I decide I’ll finish watching the movie before I retrieve my blue bin.

After Paul Newman nails the killer, I go outside and am faced with a mystery of my own: My recyclables are gone, but so is my blue bin.

I call the city, and a polite woman listens to my problem; after I mention that one side of the bin was cracked but the bin was still serviceable, she theorizes that the crew took it, believing I meant to throw it away — even though I’ve been using it for five years.

Oh well.

The woman takes my address and tells me I can get a new bin at City Hall within the next week.

A few days later I report to City Hall and am greeted with a metal detector and a clerk behind a desk who tells me to empty my pockets of metals and place them in the usual plastic container. As I surrender my keys and change I explain why I’m there.

“Oh,” the clerk says, “you don’t have to go through the detector!” Which I had suspected after spotting the stack of blue bins by the desk. (It would have helped if the clerk had asked me the purpose of my visit first.)

“Oh, and you didn’t need to remove your change!” (It would have helped if … oh, never mind.)

After checking my address against a list, the clerk hands me a new bin.

Mission accomplished!

But not quite.

As I exit the building a man in a truck across the street is calling out to me. I walk over to him to see what he wants while managing to duck an oncoming vehicle on the narrow street.

“What number do I call to get a blue bin?”

Once again I have been cast in the role of Someone Whose Obligations in Life Include Answering Strangers’ Questions on Demand. How should I know what number to call? I don’t work for the city, let alone have all the city phone numbers engraved on my brain at a time in my life when I’m lucky to remember where I left my keys.

I politely explain this to the guy. He seems to understand, and I go home with my new treasure.

The next day is Trash Day, and I get a pleasant surprise: The recycling crew comes on the right day, and comes early too.

As I carry my emptied bin back to the porch, I notice some printing on its side:

“Need a blue bin?" And it's followed, of course, by the number to call.

Oh well.

No thanks for this memory

The free anti-virus software on my computer wants to get to know me better.

To be more precise, it wants to get to know my wallet better.

Every once in a while it puts a pop-up on my screen, telling me of a problem it has supposedly found, a problem it can “resolve” if I allow it to do so. Of course I know that if I press “resolve” it will ask me for money.

I usually ignore such messages, but the other day it sent a pop-up that has me thinking about a problem that the software, as good as it may be, can’t resolve, no matter how many credit cards I max out.

The pop-up said my computer is cluttered with all sorts of files that I don’t need and which are clogging up the works. The software wants to get rid of them.

Considering that I could probably fit the entire contents of “Moby-Dick” several times over on my hard drive, I didn’t pay much attention to this message.

But I thought about it recently as I was waiting for a bus.

You know how it is when you’re killing time waiting for something to happen: Your mind wanders hither and yon (does anything ever wander yon and hither?) and your brain cells carom off the sides of your cerebellum. (Or maybe they carom somewhere else, if they carom at all.)

One thought led to another, then another, ad almost infinitum, and suddenly I found myself, God knows why, remembering something I hadn’t thought of in years:

The theme music for “The Galloping Gourmet.”

Remember that show? It starred a guy named Graham Kerr, and on every episode (I can even remember when it aired and what station aired it, God help me) he would spend a half-hour preparing a recipe while kidding around with the audience and brandishing a glass of wine. He seemed to want us to think he was sozzled, though I’ve read that he didn’t really drink much; apparently he was stealing a page from the Dean Martin Cookbook.

A few of the jokers at school made a meal out of Kerr’s mannerisms, although I suspect a lot of female viewers who watched the handsome young chef wouldn’t have minded a few extra helpings.

Graham Kerr spoke softly and carried a big shtick, but even the biggest of shticks eventually bows and breaks under the winds of public taste, and one day the show served its last course.

I was surprised to find that Kerr is still around — he’s 88 now — and in the years after “The Galloping Gourmet” he became a born-again Christian, repenting both his sins and the high-fat feasts he conjured up for his viewers.

Which is probably more than you want to know about Graham Kerr. I know it’s more than I want to know.

And I can’t help wondering why, at a bus stop on a cold April day, my brain couldn’t come up with a better memory: me sitting on my grandmother’s lap, playing with her bracelet that had the names of all six of us kids; or me sitting in a second-grade classroom and watching a pretty blonde — was her name Jean? — as she came in from the rain, wearing the kind of shiny yellow coat that all of us kids wore in such weather, the kind of coat that always had a distinctive plastic smell; or me sitting on a floor in my sister’s house, trying to amuse my infant niece with Playskool props as she graciously pretended that I really was amusing. (Thirty years later, she’s still gracious — and engaged to be married next year. I’m tempted to ask where all the time goes, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer.)

Memo to The App Store: If you ever come up with a program that can defrag my brain, my Visa card and I will be first in queue.