Brown Paper Bags

     When I was a kid, they didn’t ask at the grocery store if you wanted paper or plastic bags.  They just put your stuff in a brown paper bag, and that was that.  After we emptied the bags at home, we folded them flat and stashed them between the fridge and counter.  There they stayed until we needed another garbage bag in the kitchen. We would fold the top edge down a couple of inches to keep the bag open, and it stood open on the kitchen floor ready to receive our garbage.  They worked well for dry or mostly dry trash.

     One of my earliest memories involves a brown paper garbage bag.  Why this is so will become apparent. 

     When I was four or five, I was running around the house one day playing in (what I must assume was) my usual state of oblivion. This was before I started school, and being the baby of the family, I was the only child home with Mother.  I stopped briefly in the kitchen where Mother was working, and the next thing I knew she was smacking me on my skinny behind, demanding, “What is the MATTER with you?”

     To this day, I still don’t know what was the matter with me.  The sudden spanking snapped me out of whatever I was in and also completely ruined my aim—I was peeing in the garbage bag.