Bread Baggage

It snowed today, a few inches. Scott asked me if I had any boots. The moment that I replied "no," a long-forgotten childhood memory suddenly log jammed my brain. When I was little and we visited my grandma's in Indiana for Christmas, we never had snow boots. It didn't make sense for us to have them for just one trip up north each year. So, my mom used to have us double up on the socks and then wear bread bags over the socks and then our usual tennis shoes over the bags. I think there might have been some rubber bands around the ankles, too, but I'm not so sure about that detail. It was the 80s, so of course, to cover up the bizarre practice of wearing bread bags on our feet, we wore leg warmers. This noisy solution to the problem of lacking snow boots kept our toes warm and dry while we went sledding, though I can't imagine what the neighbors and my cousins thought. (Probably thought, gee, how many sandwiches did this family of five kids have to eat to get ten bread bags?)

Then, I remembered another thing about bread bags. (How many traumatizing memories about bread bags can I dig up from one childhood? The answer, my friend, is many!) My parents also used to save the bread bags because they were so handy for lunches and leftovers. But for some reason, my dad wasn't satisfied with reusing them just once. No, he had to breathe more life into each square foot of that plastic than was ever inhaled by the original organisms that decayed to form the petroleum byproduct that makes up the bag. He would reuse the bread bag and then, if they were still remotely clean, he'd put them back in a drawer, which we called The Bag Drawer. This drawer was stuffed full of years' worth of bread bags, so that you had to do a quick little stuff-slam-yank-your-hand-away maneuver to close the thing without bags exploding out like a jack in the box. He'd reuse these bags so many times, that the plastic or maybe the printing on the bags would start to disintegrate. They were all sticky, and I think that their stickiness was infectious, so a new bag would get sticky from residing in such close proximity with the ancient bags. I also think he might have put them in the washing machine, but perhaps this is only an exaggeration that my mind has accepted as real. I remember that I hated those sticky bags so much that I would hide new bags around the house for my own personal use. That way, I could pack my lunch in a brand new reused bread bag.

By the way, my family ate only Roman Meal brand wheat bread. This is exactly what the bags looked like:

[Image from: http://www.romanmeal.com/]