We Brown Bag It

   The brown paper bag has gone through different stages of evolution as I’ve grown up. It started out as the brown bag for all of my penny candies that I would get with my weekly allowance. I remember getting my weekly dollar, yes that is right, no typo, $1 and running to the local convenience store with my sister whee would stand in front of all our gushy yummy options giving the store lady our meticulously thought out order. I don’t know how she had the patience to dole out 100 little tiny candies in increments of 10 of these, 5 of those, 15 of these . . . But she made us the happiest little girls. We would clutch our little brown bags of treats as we ran home, holding our treasures close and drooling at the mouths.

   In the late teens the brown bag became a good spot to inconspicuously hide alcoholic beverages, or so we thought, but ends up everyone else in the world, including several homeless people, know of this trick as well. So maybe it wasn’t so well hidden, but the brown bag now served the purpose of holder of a more adult treasure than penny candies. (Now let’s not be crazy, I was not out publicly getting drunk all the time and trying to hide it, but I do know that I used this “trick” at least once, watching a fireworks show where drinking was not prohibited.)

   Now, the brown bag has taken on an all new meaning, and unfortunately for our daughters, their first little brown bag memory will not be filled with penny candies. On the boat we use these convenient little bags in our bathrooms. We have them stacked next to our toilet paper, and use them for the business you do in the bathroom (number 2) that you don’t want other people glancing upon when they open the airtight bathroom tin to insert their toilet paper. It’s a simple step that we added to our bathroom routine that helps tremendously with smell, and visuals for whoever follows you next into the head. We came up with this idea ourselves, don’t really remember how we thought of the brown bag as a toilet paper concealer but we are sure happy we did. We initially bought them online but when we ran out while in Bahamas we managed to find them at Darville Lumber, in Georgetown, and replenished our stock. We found that in the Bahamas they are quite aware of my Late Teen Brown Bag Beer Koozie trick, and so brown paper bags were not hard to come by.