It's in the Bag. 06/13/25

You know those community cleanups? The kind where you see your neighbors picking up trash and placing them into big bags with pointy sticks? The kind where you see your neighbors participating and then suggest to your spouse, “We should go down there and do that.” Of course, we participate in community cleanups all the time. Okay, at least some of the time. Well for sure next time. Anyway, these ventures are filled with well-meaning citizens and some court-ordered felons who are doing this as part of serving out their sentences. Slightly different motivations. And never the twain shall meet. Until John and I put them in the same scene.

And then there was the bag man. Your grocery bag habit really depends upon where you live. If it’s in a suburb, you drive to the grocery store and therefore the trunk of your car is filled with bags. If you’re in the city, you likely store them in the hall closet or laundry room. Or if you’re like my wife and I, you store them in the trunks of both cars, and in the laundry room. Damn, do we have a lot of grocery bags. How many times have you walked into a grocery store with one or two bags and then you buy so many groceries you don’t have enough room? Then you are faced with a moral dilemma. Do I run back to my car to fetch another bag, while holding up the entire line and making everyone hate me, or do I sheepishly buy another bag at the register? By my personal estimation, we have so many bags we’ve saved over 3,000,000 plastic bottles from polluting our waterways in just our house alone. That’s why I don’t feel so bad about skipping the last community cleanup. But we’ll partake in the next one for sure though.

See you next week and don’t forget your reusable bags,

Andy and John