No Waste Allowed Here.

It's early Friday morning and you take a drive thinking the summer morning will be grand. Wrong. As you stop by the corner of a Tim Horton, you see a trash can overflowing with garbage. Empty paper cups, tissue papers, plastic straws, discarded paper bags from some Fast Foods.

The strike is still on, by some twenty four thousand City of Toronto workers, which is affecting garbage pick up, city run day care centres, water and sewer, swimming pools, summer camps, community centres, museums and galleries, island ferry and some libraries.

The condo has resumed normal garbage disposal. But private residences are having problems where to dump their waste. City parks have been turned into temporary dumping sites, but as of last week, residents who lived near parks were up in arms to prevent further dumping where they live. They say it stinks.

When I walk the dog Shadow and he makes a poop, and I scoop it, I feel guilty throwing it in the garbage bin, knowing that others have no place to dump their trash.

And then I remember the old neighbourhood of Mandaluyong where I grew up. Garbage collection then was once a week, but there were times when we had more garbage before the pick up day, so we'd pay some kids to collect them. Little did we know that the kids were throwing the refuse in the nearby Pasig River. Now, I feel guilty that one way or another, we contributed to the pollution of that once beautiful river.

And then the first time I went home to the Philippines after a long absence, I noticed plastic bags hanging by the tree outside my mother's house. When I queried as to what they were, my mother told me that they were garbage awaiting the next day collection and kept hung above so that the street dogs would not open or destroy them. It seemed that they could not leave these garbage in trash bins, because the bins kept missing.

And with regards to Manila's image as a city of trash? Fortunately, it has blurred somewhat because of more interesting news such as the recent bombings in the south.

Another trash story I remember is the time I moved to a basement apartment in Jersey City. A mother and her daughter who lived on the third floor knocked on my door one evening and asked if I took their big plastic garbage bin which they left lying by the curb. Maybe I looked like a foreign thief, but I politely said "no."

I took to not talking to this mother and daughter team from then on. And one evening, another knock at my door and it was the daughter asking me if I could drive them and their possessions to the new apartment they were moving into. Again, I politely said, "no."

Waste has a way to get into people's lives. Some relationships start fresh and clean and turn sour and become a waste. Some start bitter and turn sweet, and the bitter times were a waste. Some start bitter and never go far, and the time spent getting to know each other was a waste.

But what could be a bigger waste than wasting time that could have been spent loving instead of fighting, talking instead of remaining silent, smiling instead of frowning, dancing instead of sulking, reading instead of watching senseless shows, meditating instead of brooding, walking instead of "couching," working instead of idling, turning imaginings into touchables, building a life instead of just dreaming one.

What could be a bigger waste than wasting life cocooning inside yourself and never experiencing love? The cliche "'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," is so true. Life is too short, why waste it?

Some relationships begin as chance encounters in the most ordinary or extraordinary places, and end up as permanent partnerships or marriages - this is no waste. This is amazing.