Perfect Package
The Source
At some moment while on I was on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, blowtorch in one hand and hatchet in the other, trying to get the plastic wrap off the lid of a Lite Ranch Dressing bottle, I thought of my cousin Wilma. Once I year I used to take my young Triopians to spend the day at Dexter, a one-room schoolhouse in Northern Pike County. For years I’d ask a former teacher or student of the institution to come talk to my kids about what life used to be like in the days when you’d walk to the country school. Wilma always said she was lucky…she had a pony. Wilma would talk about carrying in coal for the school’s heating stove, playing in the creek during recess, and watching her pony try to find his stumbling path through the snowdrifts. The secret to staying warm, said Wilma, was the hard-boiled eggs. Her mother would cook up a couple on especially wintry mornings and stuff one into each of her daughter’s pockets. Wilma could then ride to school with a hand in each woolen pocket, her fingers clasped tightly around the warming egg. (The pony didn’t need steering. He’d already graduated from Dexter.) And of course the eggs then became a part of Wilma’s noontime meal. Talk about a great multi-tasker! I can remember my grandmother preparing for potlucks at her little South Prairie Presbyterian Church. No Tupperware, no Saran Wrap, just a clean, white dishtowel thrown over the casserole. And you know what? Nobody died. I can’t remember seeing a single South Prairie Presbyterian keel over in a choking fit of food poisoning. Clean, white country dishtowels were the perfect deterrents to any strain of Presby-killing bacteria. A miracle. One of the requirements of our old-fashioned day at Dexter is that each child bring his or her own lunch wrapped as great-grandpa would have carried his to school…no plastic, no Styrofoam, no petroleum-based covering of any sort. At first the kids are flummoxed. There was life before Tupperware? The ancient pioneers didn’t strap Rubbermaid containers to the back of their Conestoga wagons? What the heck kind of country did we have back then? Of course the greatest consternation was among the students’ mothers. What can I possibly pack for little Herbie to eat without bubble wrapping? How can he survive an entire day in the Pike County wilderness without child safety caps on his meatballs? We always managed to survive. Our school bus would be laden heavily with cookies wrapped in red handkerchiefs (which you then wrapped around your head to go wading in McKee creek), hand towels carefully cushioning peanut butter sandwiches (and everyone needs a towel after falling happily into the creek), and cardboard boxes filled with chocolate brownies (cardboard boxes are at a premium among a seventh-grade class who’ve just captured their first toads.) It’s a joyous day, despite of our total lack of sanitary precautions. Like Presbyterians, 7th-graders seem to be auto-immune, and the Morgan County Health Department wasn’t there that day so I didn’t wear my hairnet. So I look down at my bottle of salad dressing…it looks so harmless. Picking it off the shelf you would have no idea that its contents are actually protected like a Mideast tyrant’s bombproof bunker. You begin with a piece of plasti-paper choking the neck of the bottle. On this little strip of kryptonite there’s an arrow with a dotted line, indicating that this is perhaps how the bunker is to be entered. It isn’t. Peeling on the arrow does absolutely no good. It’s a trick. So you grab a butcher knife and decapitate the wrapper, twisting the cap open to find that the mouth of the bottle is now sealed with an oval of cardboard. It’s another trick. There’s a pop-up flap that would lead you to believe that by simply pulling on the protrusion the final line of defense would come off. It doesn’t. Actually it comes off in your hand, but now you’re left with a circle of white cardboard that requires another attack with the butcher knife. Everything from here on out is wasted effort. Your lettuce has now wilted, and the tomatoes have turned to a gooey puree. It’s at this point where I usually look around for a couple of hard-boiled eggs and wish I had a pony.