Our house in Pittsburgh, was located in a row of homes, now neatly referred as town homes. We were situated at the end of the row, giving us access to an alley, which during the day, provided a bunch of outdoor creative opportunities of inventive games, but in the evening, the same cheerful exciting pathway from the front of the house to the back yard, was nothing but a haunted dark tunnel, where surely the spirits of the dead, zombies, or monsters waited to grab you and God knows what happened after that. At the back of our house were 15 cement steps leading to the cellar door. That door was made of the strongest wood, but trying to open or close it, one might have thought it was pure steel. At the bottom of the 15 steps, right before you could or would try to open our cellar door was a drain a circular whole with a very rusted mesh covering. Anything and everything from the top of the 15 steps could and would follow the rules of gravity and flow gently or in the case of a good summer Pittsburgh thunderstorm, fall in torrents to the drain.
My father, was a cop, and his days off were random, but when he had a day or two, at times he became the handy man. I loved my dad, but his handyman activities always included the use of his two youngest children, me and my little sister, and when he would utter the scary words of lets clean the drain, my little sister and I would shudder. Lets clean the drain, meant Would first have to reach into that pit of hell , reach for whatever ghastly gook, bigs, or dead things lived and died. Then, even though my hand were small, my poor little sister who had even smaller fingers had to reach deep, deep into the the entrance of Dante’s inferno and pull out the the most gross of gross crawly, smooshed and used to be living things remaining. We would beg our dad to just let whatever died in that drain remain. Our pleas went unheard and instead of removing the rot of existence each week, we waited until the pile of putrid stuff accumulated and accumulated. If only my younger sister and i ha been brave enough on our own to just, once a week face our fears and dig out the junk of the drain, we could have eased the fears of too much, too late and too bad!
Each and every day when I read that the Trump Dictatorship has once again ignored the Constitution, continued to scam the American public, conducts personal business, permits his family to rip off our economy and is still colluding with Russia, and the only response is wait, his time will come and not a thing IS really done to stop him (Except for endless emails to me from Tom Perez and the DNC to give $3) I think of the drain at the bottom of our house and all of the most miserable of Earth’s garbage lying there. All I can do is think, the more we wait the more disgusting the pile of shit will grow. the more the pile of shit grows the more difficult it will be to remove it. the more difficult to remove the more lazy we become and then suddenly it is ignored and considered just the way of life, it is what it is. Cleaning the drain was awful work, but so fulfilling once all of the crap was gone.
