The Garbage Man - Sharon Curtin

In the short story "The Garbage Man" by Sharon Curtin it tells about a girl which finds a new passion. The children used to swim in the pool but they closed it. So now they swim in the river instead.  Unfortunately they did it against their mother's will. The swimsuit got taken away and she got put on restriction.
By starring at the cottonwoods trees she started to be more and more interested in watching the Garbage Man. He was an old man, who collected the scraps from the people’s garbage to give it to his chickens. Then he sold the eggs back to the people for money.
She started to follow him and played her own game with him, because she expected an interesting person behind this figure. The Garbage Man had the reputation in the city that he is just disgusting, smells bad and ugly. It is said in the story that he is a “mother’s nightmare of a dirty old man, dressed in tattered stained clothing” and he wears “an old stocking cap”.
In her imagination deep in his inside he is a normal, smart, old man who is actually wealthy but wants to hide it from the folk. Nobody would ever have the idea to come too close to his house because they think there is nothing to get. She wanted to discover this.
With her sister together they made a plan to finally see his face and get a closer relationship to him. The plan did not work the way she expected it. She was disappointed because he was just an old man with the marks of being in older ages.
It is a nice story about building first your own opinion and then you can judge. Sometimes we just get disappointed by wrong expectations.