Back in the old days (by which I mean about 15 years ago), it was common to see garbage fires on construction sites. I imagine long before that, burning scraps of wood and paper and cardboard on site was the main way to dispose of the large quantity of useless junk generated by a construction project. Well, there was one other way. I’d imagine, if you were to do any amount of digging around any building constructed more than 25 years ago, you’d soon find yourself hauling out bricks, blocks, bits of steel and wire, probably some broken pipe, and chunks of practically everything that was used to make the building.

People have more sense now.

That means, it’s harder to get away with that, now.

Anyway, I recall one particular day when the bricklayer had a good fire going in the morning to burn his paper mortar bags and broken pallets, Pete showed up with the back of his truck loaded with what appeared to be his dining room set.

“Help me toss all this onto the fire.” He had a certain way of asking without asking, if you know what I mean. So, I started pulling broken chairs out of the back of his truck.
“What happened to these?”
“My wife got new ones.”
“So you broke these up?”

He didn’t say anything. I noticed the table he was throwing over the side was not broken.

“What’s wrong with the table?”
“It’s ugly,” he said.

I could see that the table was something he’d made, or mostly made. It seemed to be a plywood top placed on legs that may or may not have been part of a stair-railing system. “Did you make this stuff?”
“I made it all about 10 years ago,” he said, “But the chairs all got rickety.”

I saw one of the chairs had a leg hanging off it. The legs of the chairs were also made from cut-off stair balusters. He had made the seat from some thicker stock that he’d glued up and had attached the legs to the seat with screws. The seat had eventually pulled away from the leg, ultimately pulled completely off. “This is good stuff, Pete. Why are you throwing it away?”
“It’s broken.”

So, we burned it all.

“My advice to you,” he said grimly, “Is to not bother to try to save any money. Whatever you make to try to save any money, you can almost always go buy something cheaper and your wife will be happy with it. She won’t be happy with it for long, anyway, whatever it is. So you may as well just buy the shiniest piece of junk you can for the least amount of money. Use anything you have left over on whiskey.”

Pete eventually was divorced.