Grocery Bag as Metaphor

I

Instructions:

A grocery bag, the ubiquitous paper grocery bag, the glued and folded square bottomed bag must be dismantled—reduced to a flat sheet of brown paper. Take care. Monitor your work. Be wary of the errant rip.

Glue the bag on an eighteen by twenty-four piece of newsprint.

II

Mattie Knight loved tinkering. She worked in a paper bag factory where she watched flat bags slide past her—bags looking like envelopes. Paper sacks.

Mattie Knight, "mother of the grocery bag”, invented a machine part to create a paper bag with a square bottom.

Stand aside and watch the machine automatically fold and glue the flat paper.

Now, you say, dismantle the square bottom and lay it flat.

III

Every textbook must be covered.
A teacher ceases lecturing on the difference between lay and lie when she spots a bare text—"Where's the cover? "

Before free publicity laden plastic coated covers distributed by insurance companies, before sports covers, gaudy stretch covers, the brown grocery bag earned a reputation as a strong textbook cover.

I instructed entire classes on how to fold, where to fold and how to create sleeves without resorting to masking tape.

That skill, now relegated to extinction, of little consequence, a dinosaur, remains a footnote in the narrative of the paper grocery bag.

IV

A void must be filled. People run in to find new uses for the square bottomed paper bag.
Another dismantling, disassembling—

"... tired of having to scrape ice and snow off your windshield? Keep some paper bags on hand. When there's snow in the forecast, go out to your car and turn on the wipers. Then shut off the engine with the wipers positioned near the middle of the windshield. Now split open a couple of paper bags and use your car's wipers to hold them in place. After the last snow flake falls, pull off the paper to instantly clear your windshield."

V

A domestic type, a person who turns bottles upside down and waits for the last drops to seek the lowest point, the coupon collector, the person who knows where to find the free samples also knows the uses of a paper bag.

Sleep during the day—cover your windows with grocery bags.

Cut into strips and weave fanciful place mats.

VI

Instruction:

Use your viewfinder to select a composition.

The low platform is transformed into a still life of bags

My viewfinder, an old slide mount, has an inscription on the cardboard —Bryce Canyon, Fairyland Trail.

A large Stop and Shop bag morphs into a trail across the canyon. I descend into the amphitheatre, and pass a hedge of hoodoos atop a ridge— the China Wall.

A labyrinth of limestone spires stretch across the small rectangle of my viewfinder.

VII

You can date a Kodak slide mount by the graphic design. It’s a way, along with creases, to access age.
In the 1965 revisions the "corner curl" trademark began to shrink. In 1972, the "curled corner trade dress” was dropped. I compare my mount to the graphic and identify 1983—1986.

I view the scene through a twenty-three year old mount.

Cardboard mounts may warp with age.
Paper bags may crease with use.

Grace Paley wrote of a woman with “ a nicely mapped face”

VIII

Instruction: draw a contour line around the large shapes.

I drew a contour around the bags until I reached the tallest bag. That's when I recalled the hike from one side of the canyon to the opposite side. Orange and red creep through the brown while tan, pink and white obliterate what is left of the brown paper.

XI

My banana ripens in a brown lunch bag.

In the fourth grade I created a paper bag mask and walked around incognito--for a few moments.

XII

The directions blend and I am left creating the bag details. Creases or crevasses?

XIII

I won.

I used the same paper lunch bag every day for six months. One other teacher kept pace until her yogurt leaked and weakened the square bottom. Taping was not allowed.

XIV

One bag took on the characteristics of a hoodoo. My white pastel and charcoal refused to stay within the rules:

—to dismantle a bag, to reduce a square bottom to a flat sheet, to then look through an empty slide mount at intact paper bags and reproduce those bags on a flat sheet of newsprint.