(Note: this post is not about plastic pollution or recycling, so please don’t judge by the title)
On the break room table at work, someone left a baggie filled with candy and gum. I took a few pieces to satisfy a sweet tooth later at break time.
One of the pieces was a small “Krabby Patty,” a gummy-like piece of candy shaped in the form of a hamburger featured on the cartoon, “Spongebob.” When I opened it, I discovered the candy was nestled inside a tiny plastic form to protect it from being smashed. I thought a thought that I used to think when I was a kid upon finding or discovering items like this: “This would make a perfect Barbie sink!”
This little one-inch-square piece of clear plastic brought back memories of my childhood’s creative methods of providing household goods and supplies to Barbie dolls. Cereal boxes and discarded food containers that could be cleaned are great resources for supplying a doll’s needs, from beds to couches, to closets to room dividers! Whenever I found a formed piece of plastic or cardboard, my mind sought out ways to make them useful. This piece of plastic could be a salad bowl or perhaps a bathroom sink – or a hat! Cardboard boxes had new lives as doll houses, with no thought or concern to them not being bright colors and store-bought. They were stackable for multi-level abodes, and accordion folding a strip of paper or thin cardboard made stairs. Left-over gift wrap made great wallpaper, or careful use of crayon and marker to draw windows with curtains, portraits on the wall, and rugs on the floor. One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received was a Barbie wardrobe hand-stitched by my mother from fabric scraps leftover from quilting projects. I think I may have cried with Gratitude, maybe not so much for the doll clothes themselves, but for the thought and the creativity and the patience and the work it took to make them.
I still sometimes use plastic and cardboard containers for small storage needs. There are volumes of YouTube videos dedicated to the art as a literal craft – more than just a hobby! – if you want to go beyond trimming off the box-top tabs! Creativity is such a wonderful thing – and the best thing about it is that it is unlimited in what can be imagined or reimagined from simple objects. The best airplanes of our pre-flight childhoods were always cardboard boxes – flaps intact as wings. Even cats and dogs often prefer the containers to the toys that came in them!
To say that an object or container has lost its value after it is opened is to put a damper on the imagination. Of course, we can’t keep every box or piece of plastic we obtain, but it’s fun to think about how something can be used in a different way than for what it was originally created.
Maybe people are this way, too. Mothers and fathers had lives before they were parents, which can be a surprise to their children (I remember being shocked, in third grade, to realize that the sisters at my Catholic elementary school actually used the bathroom and ate food in a dining room!). A person who performs a certain job for many years may decide to quit to pursue a different dream, out of want or necessity. Someone else may have interests outside what you think “fits” their normal persona of your experience. I once heard of a brain surgeon who quit his job to become a bagel-maker because that had always been his dream. Not sure if that’s true, but there are plenty of other stories of similar nature. And what about homeless or unemployed people? Who are they beyond – and before – their current life experience? What about the dreams of the misfit kids from broken homes? We don’t know everything about everyone, no matter how generically we try to understand them, and neither do we know what people are capable of based on a first impression that can often be influenced by circumstances beyond their control.
Thomas Carlyle translated Goethe’s words from German to say: ‘When we take people merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved.’ Could this be likened to seeing another use for an original container, or simply saying the best in others no matter how they are presenting?
The next time you open a package, I invite you to look at it as more than a wrapping for a new phone or pint of strawberries or even candy container. What else can it be?
What else – or who else – could you be?
barbaraquin 