I am getting old. Even if I don't feel it internally, I know I am.
I can remember the beginnings of Plastics. Not the line from the Graduate. That line was already funny because it was happening all around us.
I mean I can remember plastics coming to the kitchen sink and the grocery store and to many other experiences.
Memories such as that tell me I'm old. For me, old is when I'm holding memories for the tribe. But no one seems to care about the memories and if they do, they don't have time to savor them or do them justice, much less learn from them.
And I, I tuck them away in a journal or type them into a blog and hope that someone, somewhere, will find them and appreciate them.
A life is lived so swiftly, yet each life is so unique. I sometimes wonder if we aren't all living the same life!!! And so, I watch from the elder stance and still it makes no sense.
I begin to wonder too, is it not supposed to make sense and we are all just wasting our time? Or, does it make no sense because sense is a part of our human experience that is not needed in the next phase of being? I believe we are spirtually-based beings having a human experience and it may be so.
One other belief I carry is that choices drive us in our human experience and all that I am is a result of the choices I have made. All I will be is too.
Yet are those choices a part of our human nature or a part of our spiritual nature? I believe some choices are human, some spirit and some both.
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14 years ago
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Sandy mentions memories of plastics becoming part of our life. Somehow, this immediately brought me back to the kitchen of our home in Sioux City, Iowa. A kitchen in a house build nestled into a hill. A kitchen with a concrete floor and a back wall with no windows because that part of the house was in effect underground. I always thought of that back part of the house as a cave. The side door was definitely a cave entrance, as it clearly had earth on top and on the side of it. The route to the upper floor of the house was up the side of the hill. There was an apartment up there, a bit bigger than the one we were living in, as the back of the house was level with the ground at that point.
As far as plastics go, the flashback shows me looking into the refrigerator, at bowls of leftovers covered with various sized plastic "shower caps", round sheets of thin plastic gathered at the edge with elastic to hold tight to the bowl. What had we used prior to this? Waxed paper, held in place with rubber bands is my memory.
Also in that refrigerator were packages of oleo-margarine, or oleo as we called it. They were packaged one pound to a plastic bag, and the oleo was white. There was a little orange-red button of food coloring you had to pinch to release it to the oleo, then knead the bag until the dye was spread throughout the oleo, creating a transformation from a lard-like substance into something we could think of as butter.
It seems that at the time, it was illegal in some states to sell yellow margarine. Something about protecting the dairy industry.
Now margarine is supposed to be bad for us, and we may someday be strangled in a mass of undecomposed plastic. And I've forgotten what Sandy's point about plastic was.
Oh yes, Sandy seems to have used the memory to trigger thoughts about the present. Memories for me always evoke thoughts about the past, sometimes catapaulting me there. I know we both often wonder where am I now, where am I going, what am I here for, it just seems easier for me to go off in the direction of what happened, why did it happen, what did it mean? But then, I don't hold the intention to stay in the present as seriously as she does. History is important to me. After I'm gone, I want people to know how we covered our food and transformed white stuff into yellow stuff to make it look like real butter.
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