Polyethylene Nightmare

I have just made a terrible discovery. I live with the plastic-bag man.

You know the guy who drives the car filled with old newspapers, or the lady who has forty-seven cats, or the neighbor who has seven cars, each in a progressively worse state of decomposition—I am married to one of “them”. And, I am afraid.

I went into the garage this morning to look for cake pans to bake a cake for my mom’s birthday, and what I found was shocking.

It started with me cursing as I removed a thirty-pound car seat stacked atop my early American pottery collection. How absolutely careless? But as I moved the car seats and luggage from their precarious perches on a pile of boxes boldly marked “FRAGILE!” I noticed that the boxes, bags, and packages had been pushed into a corner by an enormous plastic-bag covered mountain.

As I started digging into the monstrosity, taking up a mere third of the garage—I realized it was ONLY plastic bags. There was no substance to it, just bags. Seven months of grocery bags, taking over our garage. They were everywhere. Tucked into small spaces between packing boxes, filling cardboard boxes, overflowing from paper sacks, in old cups and used envelopes. It was like traveling through the recesses of the mind of madman. With every scrunched, wadded, knotted, ball of this material, I felt increased outrage and confusion.

How did it come to this? How could plastic bags take precedence over sanity? Am I somehow to blame? (This question courtesy of my Catholic nun.)

I have avoided the garage with the lame excuse that it is a man’s domain. But truthfully, I just don’t want to face it. Now, I see that my denial has led to an ugly secret. I am grateful that I did not uncover an affair or maybe a pile of pornography, but there is something about this discovery, which still feels like an indiscretion. I can’t put my finger on what he did that was wrong, but it is there—squished into a crevice in my brain.

Yes, I can see the humor in it. I can also see the insanity. But more than anything, I see the importance of the question that I always found inconsequential until now, “Paper or Plastic?”