1 Let me mention another fairly important development in the history of the straw. I recently noticed, and remembered dimly half noticing for several years before then, that the paper wrapper, which once had slipped so easily down the plastic straw and bunched itself into a compressed concertina which you could use to perform traditional bar and dorm tricks with, now does not slip at all. It hugs the straw’s surface so closely that even though the straw itself is stiffer than the earlier paper straw, the plastic sometimes buckles under the force you end up using in trying to push the wrapper down the old habitual way. A whole evolved method for unwrapping straws—one-handed, very like rapping a cigarette on a table to ensure that the tobacco was firmly settled into the tube—now no longer works, and we must pinch off the tip of the wrapper and tear our way two-handedly all the way down the seam as if we were opening a piece of junk mail. But I have faith that this mistake too will be corrected; and we may someday even be nostalgic about the period of several years when straws were difficult to unwrap. It is impossible to foresee the things that go wrong in these small innovations, and it takes time for them to be understood as evils and acted upon. Similarly, there are often unexpected plusses to some minor new development. What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear off the top? The nakedness of a simple novelty in pre-portioned packaging has been surrounded and softened and made sense of by gesticulative adaptation (possibly inspired by the extinguishing oscillation of a match after the lighting of a cigarette); convenience has given rise to ballet; and the sound of those flapping sugar packets in the early morning, fluttering over from nearby booths, is not one I would willingly forgo, even though I take my coffee unsweetened. Nobody could have predicted that maintenance men would polish escalator handrails standing still, or that students would discover that you can flip pats of pre-portioned butter so they stick to the wall, or that tradesmen would discover that they could conveniently store pencils behind their ears, or later that they would gradually stop storing pencils behind their ears, or that windshield wipers could serve as handy places to leave advertising flyers. An unpretentious technical invention—the straw, the sugar packet, the pencil, the windshield wiper—has been ornamented by a mute folklore of behavioral inventions, unregistered, unpatented, adopted and fine-tuned without comment or thought.
1 People seem to raise their eyebrows whenever they bring something close to their faces. The first sip of a morning cup of coffee makes you raise your eyebrows; I have seen some individuals displace their entire scalp along with their eyebrows whenever they bring a forkful of food to their mouths. A possible explanation is that eyebrow-raising is a way of telling your brain not to activate the natural flinch reaction that the approach of moving objects near the face normally triggers.
1 In those first months of cooking dinner for myself, after years of eating the food that Seiler’s and ARA had cooked for me, I studied with fresh interest the origination of the boiling bubbles in the Revere pan as I waited to pour in the Ronzoni shells: at the very beginning of boiling, grains of mercury broke free and rose upward only from special points on the floor of the pan, requiring a little scratch or irregularity in the metal to harbor their change of phase; later several beaded curtains of midsized spheres streamed where the parallel curves of the electric coil were most completely in contact with the pan’s underside; later still, as glutinous, toad-like globes of hard boiling took over, my glasses misted—and I was reminded of being awakened by my parents years earlier from dreams in which I been trying to drink very thick shakes through impossibly slender straws. My father carried me to the bright kitchen saying cheerfully, “Croup again, croup again,” his hair sticking in unusual directions, and he held me near the plume of steam coming from the small kettle that my mother had put on. I inhaled; the desire to croak melted in the branches behind my sternum, and as I breathed I thought happily about the blue gas flame pouring upward and flattening itself against the bottom of the kettle—the same flame which a few years later I was allowed to cook hot dogs over, skewering them on a dinner fork: grease from the hot dogs was released in short-lived fiery sparks, best seen if you turned off the light, though notable too for their paler yellow effects in daylight, and the heat charred to prominence the spoked pattern of the two ends of the hot dog. Anyway, once I let my glasses clear, I poured the Ronzoni shells into the tumultuous water: there was a hiss and a moment of complete, white-watered calm. Unless you stirred at that point, I found, your yield of shells would diminish, because some would stick to the bottom of the pan.
1 You would think, after that sort of explosion, that the outcome would need time to set and firm in cooling racks, but no, you can eat the results just afterward, or you can eat them when they have waited in one of the high salted drifts warmed by the flat heating bulb with a frosted yellow blinding face and a back painted with reflective black material that has tiny scratches in it through which the wattage shines. Needing an actual taste of popcorn to confirm these recollections of how it had seemed that day, I recently looked in the cupboards and found an old package of Jiffy Pop—not the new microwave Jiffy Pop, but the old aluminum Jiffy Pop, a relic of the great age of aluminum, when you tented it over turkeys, teased it off the inside of gum wrappers, froze with it, flattened out its wrinkles with your thumbnail, scraped the last crisp remnants of a Stouffer’s baked spinach soufflé off its stamped and crimped sides—and more than a relic: Jiffy Pop was the finest example of the whole aluminous genre: a package inspired by the fry pan whose handle is also the hook it hangs from in the store, with a maelstrom of swirled foil on the top that, subjected to the subversion of the exploding kernels, first by the direct collisions of discrete corns and then in a general indirect uplift of the total volume of potentiated cellulose, gradually unfurls its dome, turning slowly as it despirals itself, providing in its gradual expansion a graspable, slow-motion version of what each erumpent particle of corn is undergoing invisibly and instantaneously beneath it. By the time the dome is completely deployed (I noticed, shaking it over the coils of the stove), the aluminum has revealed itself to be surprisingly thin, thinner than Reynolds Wrap—and you realize that the only reason it could withstand the first battery of direct pops was that at that point it had been strengthened by its twirls (except in the vulnerable flat center). To serve it, you tore back the thin foil in triangles, thus making bloom a flower no bee will ever fertilize: the final mannerist inflorescence, the second derivative, of the original harvested ear of corn. Besides Jiffy Pop, we had as I grew up the slightly earlier Jolly Time and TV Time—the pair of plastic tubes, one containing kernels, the other containing hydrogenated oil you squeezed out into the pan—and we were even given a popcorn popper, which was difficult to clean. But the invention of Jiffy Pop seemed to me in retrospect so much greater than any other popcorn-related product, including all microwavables, seemed in fact one of the outstanding instances of human ingenuity in my lifetime, that after I had eaten a few handfuls, I went to a university library and found out the name of the inventor, Frederick Mennen, made copies of the relevant patents (“. . . a wrinkled foil cover sheet adapted to be extended by expansion of container contents generated by cooking . . .”), and found a 1960 picture of him, smiling sad-eyedly in his factory in La Porte, Indiana, while behind him women in lab coats kept an eye on the conveyor belt. The first patent appeared in the U.S. Patent Gazette in 1957, a few months after I was born. I got Mennen’s home number from information and called him to congratulate him, thirty years after the fact, and to ask him whether he was prouder of the spiral package itself, or of the elegant machine he had invented to impart the spiral to the package. The phone rang six times; growing shyer with each ring, and worrying that he might have died, I hung up, dreading a widow’s frail answer.
1 I borrowed the Band-Aid from the box in L.’s apartment—I did not own a box of Band-Aids myself. And very
often you see women wistfully studying the Band-Aid shelves at CVS: perhaps they are thinking, If I buy these Band-Aids, I will have them to put in my medicine cabinet, ready to dress the minor wounds of the good man I will maybe meet at some future date, and later they will be there for the elbow scrapes of the children I will have with him.
2 At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons. Over the next week and a half, Fred, very aloof, worked his way through every size and style of Band-Aid that Johnson & Johnson made (his family, rich, could afford the comprehensive variety box, which included shapes that no longer exist, to my knowledge), refusing to show me the (very minor) wound, stringing out my guilt and curiosity by wearing the smallest Band-Aid, a tiny flesh-colored fried egg three-eighths of an inch across, long after I was sure he had only a faint white asterisk of a scar underneath.
1 Although earplugs are essential for getting to sleep, they are useless later on, when you are awakened with night anxieties, and your brain is steeping in a bad fluorescent juice. I slept beautifully through college, but the new job brought regular insomnia, and with it a long period of trial and error, until I hit on the images that most consistently lured me back to sleep. I began with Monday Night at the Movies title sequences: a noun like “MEMORANDUM” or “CALAMARI” in huge three-dimensional curving letters, outlined with chrome edgework of lines and blinking stars, rotating on two axes. I meant myself to be asleep by the time I passed through the expanding O, or the dormer window of the A. This did not work for long. In the belief that images with more substance to them, and less abstract pattern, would encourage the dreaming state, I pictured myself driving in a low fast car, taking off from an aircraft carrier in a low fast plane, or twisting water from a towel in a flooded basement. The plane worked best, but it didn’t work well. And then, surprised that I had taken so long to think of it, I remembered the convention of counting sheep. In Disney cartoons a little scene of sheep springing lightly over a stile or a picket fence appears in a thought-cloud above the man in the bed, while on the soundtrack violins accompany a soft voice out of 78 records saying, “One, two, three, four . . .” I thought of story conferences in Disney studios back in the golden days of cartoons: the look of benign concentration on the crouching animator’s face as he carefully colored in the outline of a suspended stylized sheep one frame farther along in its arc, warm light from his clamp-on drafting-table lamp shining over the pushpins and masking tape and the special acetate pencil in his hand—I was soon successfully asleep. But though this Disney version achieved its purpose, it felt unsatisfactory: I was imagining sheep, true, but the convention, which I wanted to uphold, called for counting them. Yet I didn’t feel that there was any point to counting what was obviously the same set of animated frames recycled over and over. I needed to pierce through the cartoon, and create a procession of truly differentiable sheep for myself. So I homed in on each one in its approach to the hurdle and looked for individuating features—some thistle prominently caught, or a bit of dried mud on a shank. Some times I strapped a number on the next one to jump and gave him a Kentucky Derby name: Brunch Commander, Nosferatu, I Before E, Wee Willie Winkie. And I made him take the jump very slowly, so that I could study every phase of it—the crumbs of airborne dirt floating slowly toward the lens, the soft-lipped grimace, the ripple moving through the wool on landing. If I wasn’t off by then, I backed up and reconstructed the sheep’s entire day; for I found that it was the approach to the jump, rather than the jump itself, that was sleep-inducing. Some sheep had probably reported for work around noon several towns over, tousled and fractious. Around two in the afternoon, while at my office, expecting a rough night, I had (I imagined) placed a call to one of the shepherd-dispatchers: Could she send out some random number of sheep not larger than thirty to arrive outside my apartment by 3:30 A.M., for counting? The practiced crook of the sheep dispatcher travels over her herd, pointing: “You, you, you”; she repeats my address again and again to her nodding subjects; and my personal flock departs fifteen minutes later, with a voucher to be signed on arrival. All that afternoon they cross village greens, wade brooks, and trot along the median valleys of highways. While I am eating dinner with L., they are still miles away, but by bedtime, 11:30 P.M., I can spot them with my binoculars coming over a rise: tiny bobbing shapes next to a foreshortened Red Roof Inn sign, still in the next county. And at 3:30 A.M., when I need them badly, they bustle up, exhilarated from their journey: I put aside the unwritten thank-you letter I have been writhing over, log the sheep in and pay them off, and the first few begin lofting themselves over the planks and milk crates I have assembled out front, their small pink tongues visible with the effort, the whites of their sheep eyes showing; one, two, three . . . and then I have become a very successful director of fabric-softener commercials—the agency needs lush shots of jumping sheep; their fleece has to read as golden in the failing sunlight, and the greens of the countryside have to be inconceivably full-throated. I shampoo each sheep myself; I comfort the weepers; I read to the assembled flock from Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University to heighten their sense of purpose and grace, and I demonstrate to them how I need them to send their plump torsos airborne, hike up their rear legs for an added boost, throw their heads back for drama, and always, always lead in their landing with the left forehoof. I give them their cue through a rolled-up script: “Okay, number four. Lighter footfalls. Now thrust. Up. And the rear legs! More teeth! Show strain! Now some nostril! And over!” Lately I have found that the last thing in my mind before resumed unconsciousness is often the dwindling sight of one lone sheep, who, having cleared my hurdle and been checked off, full of relief and the glow of accomplishment, is hurrying over farther hills to his next assignment, which is to leap an herbal border in slow motion for L., awake with worries of her own beside me.
1 There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
1 And was it Prell concentrate or Head & Shoulders where the new unbreakable tube squirted from the showerer’s fingers (“Oops!”) over the glass shower stall, caught by the husband who studied it with wonderment? Manageability—the romance of the notion would come back if I paused in the shampoo aisle for a minute: so Harold Geneenian a word to be murmured by models whose hair looked like Samantha’s on Bewitched. And I would recall the family who, more in sorrow than in anger, told their father please not to wear his blue blazer because of dandruff flaking, until after he used Head & Shoulders (a repulsive name for a shampoo, when you think of it, but you never do); and the woman whose life was so busy that she used an aerosol shampoo-in-a-can in the privacy of the elevator, brushing her oiliness away, exiting twenty floors up with glossy highlights.
1 Already the disruption begins: the last few times I visited a CVS they did not staple my bag at all, though the stapler was lying right there by the cash register—they had switched to using a plastic bag with two integral carry loops that made it look like the top of a pair of overalls, and this plastic was impossible to staple effectively. I wonder whether close observation and time-motion studies showed CVS management that because the stores were permanently understaffed, the higher incidence of successful shoplifting attendant on unsecured bags would be more than outweighed by the faster throughput of cashiers who did not have to spend extra seconds stapling.
1 I forgave her completely for this delay: these plastic coin rolls were a very unhappy development in the life of the cashier. Paper coin rolls had beauty: interesting pulpy colors, soft paper-bag paper but heavy with the density of money inside; and good cashiers could crack them open against the edge of a coin trough and h
ave their entire contents poured into place in five seconds. But even so, when I first saw the plastic rolls (around 1980), I was excited, I was upbeat: you could tell more easily from the edges of the ranked coins which they were, and the plastic was probably the product of some magnificent sorter/counter/packager/bundler at the bank. But plastic, unless it is made unmanageably thick, will, unlike paper, tear easily once it has been nicked (as in shrink-wrapping on record albums)—and nicks undoubtedly would happen in big heavy bags of coin rolls: thus the plastic coin roll advocates were evidently forced to adopt a thickness of their chosen material that made the cashier’s life a time of periodic exasperation, especially if she had long fingernails. What we needed here was some kind of pull tab, extending the length of the roll, similar to the thread in the Band-Aid wrapper, except functional.
1 My mother had said unexpectedly one afternoon while we both sat at the kitchen table (I was reading “Dear Abby” while finishing a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk; she was reading Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences for a course she was taking) that it was not a good idea to take a drink of what you were drinking before you had swallowed what you were chewing—not, she explained when I asked her why, because you were more likely to choke, but because it was considered rude; rude in a subtler way, apparently, than the childish crudity of talking with your mouth full or “smacking your lips” (a phrase I still don’t fully understand), because, though you offered no unpleasant sights or noises to others present, you did allow them to make undesirably detailed inferences about the squelchy mixing and churning that was going on behind your sealed lips. The thought that I had grossed my own mother out at the kitchen table was painful to me; I never again took a sip while still chewing in public, and I felt my stomach flip when others did; but since in the case of milk and cookies simultaneity really is the only way to deflect the killing sweetness of the cookie and camouflage the Pepto-Bismolian cheesiness of the milk, I went ahead, relatively unobserved there on the bench, and bit and sipped by turns.
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