Plastic: A Personal History

How can I find a way to praise

it? Do the early inventors & embracers

churn with regret? I don’t think my parents

—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew

& chew & chew on plastic. But of course they

do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.

And their parents? I remember Dad

mocking his mother’s drawer of saved

rubber bands and his father-in-law’s red,

corroded jerry can, patched and patched,

never replaced for new, for never-

rusting.

             Cash or plastic? Plastic. Even

for gum. We hate the $5 minimum.

Bills paperless, automatic, almost

unreal.

           My toys were plastic, castle

and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches

ever get wrapped in waxed paper or

was it all Saran, Saran, Saran?

                                                Sarah’s mom

was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet

of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping

into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,

brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.

For everlasting.

                         You, too, must have heard stories,

now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic.

Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin.

Of shared syringes.

All our grocery bags, growing up,

were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, top

crunched into grab. We used them

to line the kitchen garbage pail.

                                                  Not that long

ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters

out of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safeway

bags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then fold

and sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift store

blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproof

and light. Clever. So clever.

                                           I regret them.

And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemed

so cheap, so easy, so use-again and thus

less wasteful, then. What did we do before

to-go lids? Things must have just spilled

and spilled.

                      Do you know

what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms

around a grain of plastic in an oyster?

Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it?

Would you buy it for your daughter

so she in turn could pass it down and

pass it down and pass it down?