It was Big Trash Day in my neighborhood. Notices had gone out that the city’s garbage trucks would pick up practically anything you put on the curb. Busted televisions, cracked porcelain toilets, cheap plastic outdoor furniture, and all your abandoned aspirations too—piles of books you never read and exercise equipment you never became fit on. Looking down my street, I thought, “Here is the real boulevard of broken dreams.”

I know one person, however, who looks at such detritus and sees something wonderful, the makings of reinvention, the spare parts for his next project, a tree house he’s been dreaming about. He is my 11-year-old son, Ben.

While I was writing these sentences, he walked into my office carrying two metal tubes with a triangular part screwed into the ends. One of the tubes still had an Ikea sticker on it. It went without saying that these tubes had come out of someone else’s garbage—I knew they had and he knew I knew.

I hid my frustration and asked in a polite voice what they were for.

“Do you know what grinding is?” Ben asked.

I thought—no, I hoped—that he was referring to skateboarding. He was definitely not talking about cooking, and I did not have any talking points at the ready for the one other area in which “grinding” is a term of art.

Happily, he proceeded to describe a maneuver in which the skateboarder jumps his board onto a rail and momentum or gravity allows him to scrape forward until, at the end of the rail, the rider is ejected back onto the pavement. I am pretty sure he lacks the mechanical skills to make a railing from these tubes, certainly not one that would allow him to practice his grinding, but I am pleased he is thinking in this do-it-yourself direction.

Only I know I will have to, at some point, perhaps after picking these tubes up off the driveway two or three dozen times, put them back into the garbage, where they have always belonged.

I wish I could accept his treasure-seeking with more aplomb, but I have struggled to keep my cool. And when I recently spotted him walking up the driveway with a broken 14-inch computer monitor under his arm, I admit that I lost it. Probably like your house, mine has too many screens to begin with, and the idea that my son was going to build his own computer from curbside discards struck me as ludicrous.

And he was ignoring countless requests to, please, for the love of God, stop bringing other people’s junk into our home. Like the spare car tire and rim from the week before. And the children’s dresser from a couple of weeks before that. And that little kid’s bicycle Bobby’s family threw out.

Later I apologized for raising my voice—hoping, as they say in the parenting books, to model the behavior I want him to learn—but I was also thinking that my approach to dealing with this issue has been flawed from the get-go. There must be a bright side to all this crap, and I needed to find it.

I thought back to Big Trash Day and all the stuff Ben brought home. A tricycle for a toddler. A multicolored umbrella. A six-foot-tall Playskool basketball hoop. Broken hockey nets. A black leather office chair.

In the midst of this maddening influx, as I was taking shelter in my office and trying to get some writing done, my wife Cynthia interrupted me and said, “You must look out the window right now! They are having a junk race.”

My son had talked several other neighborhood boys into a motley race of office chair versus tricycle versus some kind of baby’s train toy. As many kids were pushing as were riding down the middle of our street, and it was a close, close heat, full of shouts and giddy laughter. It came to be known as the Big Trash Race.

For weeks afterwards, Ben could also be seen in our driveway riding the toddler’s tricycle, for which he was much too big, twirling a multicolored umbrella, as if practicing a circus act. Actually, it was more like a silent movie skit than something you would find under the big top, a purely visual joke with no hamming it up and ever so quietly amusing. Whatever it was, I was in favor of it.

Obviously, my new, more tolerant approach could lead to problems, but for now I am trying to let Ben be the one to figure out when enough is enough. And when that time comes, he can gather up all this misbegotten treasure and put it back on the curb. The next Big Trash Day is only a year away.