LA RÉCUP

What my father left behind.

Every morning I run along the beach in Pattaya. The same road. The same resort fences. The same abandoned things.

There are always abandoned things.

An old table, its legs rusted from the salt air. A bean bag left outside by a pool bar, faded from the sun. Things people do not want anymore, or forgot they had.

When I see them I have an impulse. I want to take them.

I never do. But the thought is there, quick and specific: I could use that. I could fix that. I could bring that home and put it somewhere.

In French we call it la récupération. La récup for short. It means to recover something discarded. To take what others have given up on.

My father was a champion of it.

He came home every day with a truck full of things. Things from other people’s houses, their garages, their attics. People knew to call him when they wanted to empty a space. He came and took everything. He never left anything behind.

Some of it was treasure. Old tools, iron pieces he could use in his work. Strange beautiful things nobody else wanted.

Most of it was junk.

Our house filled up. Then the land around it. Then people in the village learned they could just leave things at the edge of our property and he would take them in. Our land became a place where things came to rest.

When we left he got worse. Without my mother, without us, there was nothing to slow him down. The house disappeared under what he collected.

Then the house burned. Everything went with it. The treasure and the junk and the iron gates he never finished and the things we left behind when we left France.

He didn’t stop. He just moved to a trailer and started again.

I think about this when I run past the faded bean bag. The impulse to take it passes in a second. I recognize where it comes from. I laugh a little.

Then I keep running.