“I recycle.  I’m a good citizen.”  The puppy performs her best sit-at-attention stance.  Well-deserving of a treat to the average eye, but I’ve grown attuned to her devious ways. 

     “I know you are, dear.  You’re just plain good at everything.”

     “I eat as much of that nasty plastic as I can find and then I poop it out and then the birds use it, so there.  I’m biodegradable.”

     Ah, if only.  “That’s ecological.”

     “Well, then, I’m that too.  I’d eat more if you’d give me more.  You’d be surprised to know what I ate today.”

     “What was that?”  The computer has been reacting a bit frivolously this morning.  I shudder at the possibilities.

     “I’m not going to tell you.  Look out in the yard under the cedar tree.  You’ll find pieces of it.  I think it might have been part of that big thing with all the wires under the desk.  Or not.  I’m never sure.  But it’s tasty stuff.  Don’t know why people say plastic is bad.”

    A trivia fact to astound your friends and neighbors:  last month was the fiftieth birthday of bubble wrap.  Throughout those fifty years, all dogs and many nondescript humans (you know who you are) have enjoyed hours of bubble-popping fun, forcing onlookers in the immediate vicinity  to resort to unpleasant and oft times illegal measures to stop the maniacal carnage.  Blood on the bubbles is not a pretty sight.

    My darling is a bubble wrap enthusiast of the first order and wants to celebrate the birthday in a fittingly grand style.  “There’s gotta be cake.  The bubbles need a cake.  Everybody’s got cake for birthdays.  Where is it?”

     Stuffed in the back of the freezer rests a decade-old piece from a now-divorced friend’s wedding cake.  Packed in…. pop, pop, pop...