Detritus

As I drove out of the parking area at our condo yesterday morning I spotted a plastic drinks container still with its lid in place, some liquid inside,  and the straw protruding, lying on its side in one of the empty numbered spaces.  Someone must have tossed it.  Our parking area is bounded by the condo building on the west and the fence separating us from the Sarasota public middle school on the east and the entrance and egress to this parking area do not lead to any through streets so that itdoes not form a natural short cut for drivers.  It is a senior citizens condo and I would be hard put to remember when last I had seen someone under the age of forty or forty five on its premises.  So where did the container come from?  It suggested to me that act of an impetuous, impatient and indifferent person, in sum, a teenager.  I am always suspicious of teenagers, imagining them alert to all the possibilities available to litter and destroy.  But why would a teenager have been in this parking lot?  Did some youth come with friends to the deserted middle school property to hang out and create mayhem ending in throwing the container over the fence?  He or she would have to have had a good throwing arm to get it so far.  Did some adult guest come and in leaving casually drop his container on the ground?  The thought sent me into a tailspin.  Anarchy!  On the public streets of America there are all kind of disposed articles which should be in bins.  But this is not an American public street but a private property parking lot.  A homeless person?  There, that is a more likely answer.  The city of Sarasota is teeming with homeless.  You can hardly get into the Selby Public Library downtown so crowded are its porches with the homeless.  But what would a homeless person be doing in our parking lot? There is no place to shelter, although legend has it that someone presumably homeless once camped out in the public toilet next to our clubhouse.  I live on the top floor at the end and can sit on my lanai (what they quaintly call a screened in porch) and view the palm trees waving in the distance and the clouds over head turning pink in the evening sunset.  I cannot bear to think that the container is down there on the macadam, just in the middle of nowhere and at the same time somewhere.  By now I was at the grocery store but still think back to that bit of detritus.  Then it occurred to me that someone of the older (and by that I mean really ancient) residents of the building had dropped the container without realizing it.  Don't snicker, reader.  You get to a certain age, and things just start eluding you.  These are my thoughts and clearly enough a mind overly active with nothing to think about.  But, Gentle Reader will notice that I did not think to retrace my steps to retrieve the offending piece and toss it into the trash.