Fresh Hell
No wonder I am screwed up.
Anyway, my mother refused to buy Saran Wrap when I was a child. She said it cost too much money and, perhaps, it did in the early '60s when she was packing lunches for four growing boys. We managed through many a brown bag feast with trusty prehistoric wax paper sealing our savory, slimy slabs o' Spam sammiches.
No wonder I am screwed up.
The world changed in the summer of 1969. Hippies frolicked and Mom went wild. She purchased her first box -- and maybe her last box -- of Saran Wrap.
To this day, I can hear her in the kitchen, moaning out of frustration. She was hopeless with gadgets. In her mind, Saran Wrap's clingy, tightening qualities might as well have been an intricate system of clock gears or movable pulleys. She could not master the physical mysteries of the thin plastic, only to have every bit of the confounded material stick and tangle unto itself, far beyond any hope of salvage -- or shrinkage.
I remember the huge wad of wild Saran Wrap, the size of a stalk of dewy bananas or Mothra's cocoon.
The mass enveloped Mom's wrist, elbow, and hand (in that order).
The yards of misguided wonderfulness at both ends of the roll fluttered in the dawn cool, stretching to her right open-toed pump, while the opposite flap continued along with a feminine swoop to an eyelash.
Mother's thumb remained miraculously fresh until my high school's shop class cut her out.
"That's a wrap," I said. "Mom, how about a shrink?"
She gave me The Slow Burn Gaze of Death™ and folded into her car and drove away.
Those kids, though, they were great. They bought me lunch.
