I used to take out the trash every Tuesday night.

The trash collection truck would arrive Wednesday morning before I hauled my creaky body out of bed to do such lift-and-carry things as taking out the trash.

So I would take the trash out the night before, after dark.

I hated it.

I was also not very reliable. There is another side to my morning limbering up: after-supper stiffening up. If I sit down to read, my joints creak, crackle and snap when I get up. I limp and hobble. It hurts to move my shoulders.

Sometimes, I would fall asleep in the chair, and then stumble into bed, forgetting the trash entirely.

Every so often, I would “forget.” Yes, sad to say, I would remember the unmoved trash, usually when removing my socks prior to going to bed.

Would I put my clothing back on, stagger downstairs, fetch the trash, go out into the cold (and, perhaps, into rain, snow or ice) and walk 100 yards to the end of the driveway?

Not a chance.

I would feign absentmindedness to my wife, but I think she knew the truth as well as I did. If I had not taken out the trash before I sat down to read on Tuesday nights, it might not get taken out at all for the early Wednesday pickup.

With just two of us in the house, that is not a problem during most weeks. We recycle glass, plastic and metal. We don’t generate much actual trash.

We also have an “unmentionable” on the closed-in back porch. It is a five-gallon “slop bucket” that holds our table scraps and cooking leftovers. We convey those to our chickens each day, letting their digestive systems turn the scraps into compost for next year’s garden.

During most weeks, we accumulate one large black plastic bag of haul-away trash, perhaps two.

But still, the two-week interval produced some stinky unhauled trash if I shirked the take-out chore.

But, eureka! Lo and behold, the trash company changed its collection schedule.

Now, the trash truck and its crew arrive early on Tuesday mornings, sometimes before dawning.

To meet that schedule, I now take the trash out to the end of the driveway each Monday — bright and early Monday morning.

Why didn’t I think of this a decade ago?

For awhile, leaving bagged trash out there for a full 24-hour day risked having the bags ripped open by varmints — or our dogs, then young and always hungry.

I solved that by tossing the trash bags atop the truck’s bed cover, then backing the truck to the end of the driveway, leaving the bags too high up for scavengers, be they ours or Mother Nature’s.

Of late, I no longer need to do that.

Our dogs have gotten older, more sedentary. They no longer roam very far afield. And they are well fed to the point of pudginess.

If I feed them at midday or later on Mondays, and increase their daily rations by an extra half-scoop or so, the well-fed venerable guardians of our domain do their barking to announce visitors or chase away varmints while lying in sunny spots near the house. No varmints nearby means I can set trash bags down onto the ground, not needing the truck.

So everything works perfectly these days — except for my own goofy mindsets.

I ought to have known a decade ago that when the trash trucks arrived on Wednesdays, I could have taken out the trash on Tuesdays during the daytime just as easily as I now take it out on Mondays when I am well-limbered and energetic enough to tend to chores and get some exercise.

Why didn’t I?

D’oh.

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

A similar self-created deadline crisis once involved these weekly newspaper columns. Since my retirement six years ago, I had sent those columns to the newspaper on Thursdays, allowing time for editing and page placement on the following Mondays.

Editor David Sullens or colleagues look for the columns near noon on Thursdays. My morning creakiness sometimes kept my fingers from tapping out these essays until midafternoon, causing angst here about late delivery and angst at the newspaper about missing stories.

But what is there about writing a column that cannot be done on Wednesdays just as well as on Thursdays? Borrowing a solution from the trash experience, I now send these in on Wednesdays. I can write them at any time Wednesday, even near midnight, and still meet the noon Thursday deadlines. Heck, I can start a first draft on Sundays if the muse awakens, and I actually have time to review the article and perhaps avoid stupid mistakes.

It is said that old dogs do not easily learn new tricks. On occasion, thickheaded old editors manage to do so.

¯¯¯

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.