Express Your Ideas To Authorities

Dear Miss Manners: I know this is really dumb, but I want to know what consideration one might expect from the sanitation department and from one’s neighbors in the age of recycling. I love recycling, but I think the process needs more thinking through.

I have two large grocery bags a week of mixed paper, small cardboard items and magazines. I don’t want to take them out to the curb early, because they look messy and it might rain.

Also, that’s my personal mail among the discards. If a bag gets kicked and broken by kids, I don’t want my personal mail blowing down the block, so I close these bags with staples. I’m sure the city hates that, so they should think of a better system than the open boxes they provide.

Cans and bottles I find easy. If they’re too messy to rinse fairly clean with one swipe under the faucet, I put them in the dishwasher. If a can is really gunked up, I toss it in the garbage. They go under the sink in a bag, then get transferred to the street at the last minute.

My neighbors are not as compulsive as I am. One keeps a recycle box in our shared carport area and throws all tins in there until it’s full, which can be a month. Nothing is rinsed, and old chili and spaghetti sauce containers are open to the heat and flies.

This used to be against the sanitation laws. Actually, I think it probably still is. But mostly I hate it because I’m compulsively tidy.

Gentle Reader: It is not in Miss Manners’ job description to deal with the garbage, although on a bad day it seems as though it were. So although she is impressed with your arguments that more thinking about recycling is required, she feels you are better qualified than she to do it.

She will confine herself to dealing with the etiquette aspect of the situation. That requires recognizing - both on your part, in dealing with your neighbors, and on the part of your local authorities, to whom you should appeal - that the recycling you feel necessary puts a burden on the citizens.

That is not to say that this is not worth it, but only that that the concept of washing the garbage is a relatively new one, for which acceptance and compliance depends on attitude as well as law. Thus, you will be more successful with law-enforcers if you suggest ways, such as better-sealed containers, to make things easier. And your neighbors will be more receptive to sympathy about their fly problem rather than complaints about their sloppiness.

Your charm in attributing your compliance to excessive tidiness is a good start. Miss Manners doesn’t for a moment believe that the opposite of messiness is compulsiveness, but she understands the value of self-deprecation in getting others up to one’s standards.

Dear Miss Manners: My husband has a rather large family and on major holidays his mother used to host a family dinner that included everyone.

For the last year or so, “Mama” has not been physically able to host this event, and I am wondering, is it appropriate to invite only the siblings and their spouses and children that we would enjoy eating and spending the day with? I am able to host this event in my home, but there are some of his siblings that my husband does not care to be around, and I feel the same.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners is afraid that you have confused two distinct social events. One is the dinner party, to which the hosts invite people they happen to like. The other is the family gathering, to which hosts invite the people to whom they are related and hope for the best.

If you want to entertain relatives you like, go right ahead. But if you do this on holidays, both Miss Manners and your mother-in-law will interpret it as splitting, rather than gathering, the family.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate