KEEPIN' IT CLEAN

He's the kind of guy you'd purposely leave a plate of cookies out for on the curb, or better yet, a six-pack. When you hear his clamoring truck coming down the street, everyone comes out to greet him - each for a different reason:

The kids like him because he lets them sit in his truck, the women come out because they want to hear the stats on his wife who is pregnant with triplets, and the men come out to find out how the surf is looking for the day, and his future surf forecasts. His energy level gets a score of a ten, especially for already being on the job at 6:00 in the morning.

Most neighbors comment that he has the perfect job, especially the ones who surf.K.C., as we all know him, really does have the ideal job. It's not the 9 to 5'er kind, and when he is finished with his route, he surfs. To be politically correct, I asked him what his occupation title should be and he proudly retorted, "Refuse Engineer".

His morning starts before 6:00 am and he is usually finished by 3:00 in the afternoon, which gives him plenty of time to rip it up in the ocean, without having to fight off any crowds for a wave. During the winter, he tries to squeeze in a thirty minute session before work.

When someone on his route gave him the special edition of this year's Surfer Magazine, he started whooping and hollering as if he had won the lottery. Mind you, this was at 6:30 in the morning, so he woke up most of the neighborhood after he yelled, "surfing rocks!"

As a true surfer, he is very protective about his favorite surf spots, so when I asked him what his favorite places were to surf, he slyly responded with this: "It's an Orange County surf break." Lot's of help K.C.! So I prodded some more and he finally said, "Ok, ok...I love great lefts and prefer surfing backside". Mind you, he's regular-footed. He's such a nice guy that he really wanted to tell me the location but pleaded to leave the name out for his buddies sake - that if it suddenly gets crowded where he surf, his buddies will never forgive him for leaking out any information.

He is charismatic. You start him on the subject of waves, and he has already spoken to so-and-so down the street who already checked the waves on 56th and reported that they were 3-5', or Mr. M- down the other street who ran past the south side of Huntington Beach and claimed that there was a great south-west swell with a mild off-shore wind with some sets as big as 8'. In other words, he is our personal neighborhood, "surfline". I'd say that he's the happiest guy I know and he loves his job.

So parents: next time you ask your kids what they want to be when they grow up, don't be at all surprised when they reply, "a refuse engineer".

-Ginny Story