There's Gotta Be a Better Word for this than Glad.

It seems to me we have come a long way in advancing a lot of things for world leaders and soccer moms. The problem of getting tangled up in the curly cord on the phone and having to lay it down while you try to reach the waffle iron in time has pretty much forever been solved. No more shuffling paper grocery bags while you struggle to put the key in the hole to unlock the car door. No grieving sessions over the camera back coming undone in the middle of the unity candle ceremony, thus exposing the entire roll.

Life is good now, except for the plastic wrap. I live in the city of engineers, rocket scientists who peer over your shoulder when you change batteries. They mill around the kitchen at the church fellowships with seven pens and a tire gauge in their pockets looking for an easily-solvable design flaw in a small appliance.

“Haven’t you guys been able to do anything about this yet?” I wave the abused plastic wrap box in their faces. There are wads of plastic wrap surrounding my undone service project. I envision myself lying on a settee explaining it all to a man with a Ph.D. and a Ferrari:

“It all began with a box. It was one of those with a saw blade attached under the ‘Open here’ flap. I was okay with that at first, because I knew ultimately the blade had a better purpose than just to cut my finger. I was deceived by that, but let’s back up. There was a roll of plastic wrap there inside the box. It had no beginning and no end. It was just a mass of continuous wrinkled transparent film. I wondered how one might begin to unravel this mystery. I soon found out. The makers do ensure that there’s one small, loose corner place. I dug my fingernail under this which began the mass futility. It’s here that, as most people can attest, the plastic wrap starts  to unroll, not uniformly across the roll, but tearing in a spiral producing a cone shape that could truly only wrap a very long set of toenail clippers. It was then I hoped to use the blade on the box to cut away this initial disaster and start all over. Though it can cut flesh, it generally is not meant to actually cut the plastic wrap, but rather to use the force behind the yank intended at severing the wrap from itself to actually catapult the roll to the floor where it unrolls both gladly and liberally.

“The engineers began to argue among themselves about the degree of the angle of my wrist at the initial point of yank while one retrieved a pen from his pocket which at closer examination, doubled as a pair of scissors and dog leash. I used the scissors part to cut what should have been squares from the roll. I was sure if I wedged one end of the wrap between my abdomen and the counter and carefully held the roll under my chin while I cut a piece holding it with all my might, this time it would not, you know. . . But it did.

“That’s when I first developed this twitch as I recall. It was slight at first, but then I began to unwad the little balls of plastic wrap on the counter and try to wrap them on the paper plates. Someone tell me how it is that the plastic wrap will stick to everything in its path, mostly itself, and then refuse to stick to the plate it was intended for. Do you think there could be a little terrorist inside that roll somewhere?”

I gave up plastic wrap early in my marriage, completely content with stale and dirty snacks. Who cares about food preservation? Preserving my mind was more important. Then phase two occurred. If they couldn’t get me on the practical, I would surely give in to the whimsical. So they began to make it in colors, and I decided to give it another shot, but what I ended up with was leftover confusion: Is this molded cornbread or just festive? Is this the pink fluff you were asking about, or is this a muffin under pink wrap?

As Solomon said, this too was vanity. Then came phase three. The food shower caps came out. Though quite a bit more expensive (I now could only afford to cover food once a week), these solved some of the earlier issues of over-self-adhesiveness and personal injuries. But a new problem replaced it. I found myself in the shower, my head covered with what should have been on the poppy seed chicken. This would have been humorous were it not for the concern over what must be sitting in the church basement over the casserole for the grieving family.

Oh, I know, I know, there are the little bags now. I say little bags because most people, and these are oddly enough adults, call them baggies or zippies or in the case of totally verbal people, zippy baggies. These are an improvement over the old stuff, but it’s just hard to fit a whole turkey skeleton in one.

But then again, given the alternative, I think it’ll fit.

Adapted from Because I Said So, Celine Sparks, 2010