So long you old bag
Goodbye plastic shopping bag. Yes, you’ve been helping to pollute our environment, you use our natural resources and consume energy in your creation and yes, you fill the land fills and clog our waterways with your bad impersonation of a really really big condom.
But I choose to remember the goodtimes. Your usefulness. Oh how you were welcomed with open arms in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The look of the future. A giant technological leap forward in the transportation of grocery items. You were stronger, lighter and more efficient. As the CD was to vinyl, you were to the old brown paper bag. As I plonked you down in between the microwave and the kitchen whiz, I could feel the winds of change on that formica bench top.
Mum loved you. She used to roll you up into little balls and put you in a draw beside the kitchen sink, When I needed something to collect dead crabs in, I turned to you. Sure I couldn’t put you over my head, cut out holes and make a mask, like I had with the old paper shopping bags. But I ‘d grown out of that shit anyway. You were water proof and for a kid, that is a useful product benefit.
You got involved in charity work. When mum had old clothes to give to the Salvation Army, you were there to hold them. When we needed something to hold all the newspapers for recycling. You were there. How ironic.
But it wasn’t all one big joy ride home from the super market in the back of mum’s Honda civic was it?
Throughout the 80’s and on toward the end of the millennium, there was one fraternity that steadfastly refused to acknowledge you. You never got the respect you deserved from the TV and movie industry did you? Despite all your hard work, those arty film types acted like you had never been invented. Time after time the props department would whip up an old brown paper bag for the scene where groceries were being carried. Why? Who really knows. Some say the clean straight lines of the paper bag were more ascetically pleasing. I know it hurt you and now your time is over.
The very people you served so well for all these years are turning against you. You and your kind are being run out of town. You’ve become the ABBA of bags. Loved intensely, then tossed aside in embarrassment with claims that you were never really liked that much anyway. I know it hurts you; this is a pain you will take to your grave and mull over during the decades it will take for you to break down.
If there is one consolation for you, it’s that inner city dog lovers will have to find something else to pick up dog with.
