One of the consequences of a long-limbed teenager no longer fitting in the back of the car is the loss of my control over the dashboard. Suddenly, the vents are spewing hot air in my face on Volume Three and the radio is emitting the sounds of Katy Perry instead of Terry Gross. A van full of boys is singing along to Firework. Have you noticed the lyrics? I quote: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again…” What happened to similes taken from nature? Are floating plastic bags so prevalent in our landscape that we started comparing our emotional states to them? They do billow, handles down, in peculiar ways. Lifted, they get stuck on trees. They fall and coil in our ponds. Sheets of plastic have very different physical properties from cloth: a plastic construction tarp blown by a gust of wind fills and flaps in a flatter, louder way than its cotton equivalent. Maybe our world is richer in experiences than the world of the ancient Greeks, who invented the simile. They were only familiar with the ways of cloth sails.
When I was little, plastic bags were very valuable. I treasured my set of several see-through ones which I used to pack everything for a 7th grade “wandering camp” in the Polish mountains. My backpack was made of heavy orange cotton fabric and was not waterproof. There was a faint diamond pattern on the surface of each bag. They did not lock; none of the bags we had did; I just rolled the tops very tight or wound them several times around my change of shoes, for example.
Later in high school, there came a fashion to sport large plastic bags with logos that came from a single store in town where you could buy things with hard currency, i.e., dollars. The store was called Pewex and sold things like: hard liquor, cashmere sweaters, cigarettes, and Levi’s. My bag had a color rendering of a large denim bottom. I carried schoolbooks in it. I even continued to take it to classes at a university in Texas in 1983 when finally, a professor I did not know took me aside and presented me with a free American backpack.
They are no longer treasures. Ubiquitous: pink ones on the 1 California bus in San Francisco, with “Thank You, Thank You” from Chinatown; thin white ones with store logos, clear ones from fruit or bread packaging, black ones for trash… Many years later, after several stints of cleaning the shoreline in Oakland, CA, and learning about the island of plastic n the Pacific Ocean, I now make a point of not taking plastic bags in stores. Can I carry a bunch of bananas and a box of cereal to my car using just my bare hands? Yes, I can!
Katy Perry’s song reminds me of another. I start singing: “Bag in the wind, all we are is bag in the wind…” It all began twenty years ago when another long-limbed youth explored Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Having entered an abandoned fortification tunnel he started waving his arms and shouted : “Kasia, come and see this! The shadows and the rays of light are moving in an incredible way! It is so cool, it is like… it is like… an MTV video!”
We used to compare stuff to nature. Now, more and more, we are comparing nature to trash.
