Bag Lady Blues

It's easy to make me feel unworthy.

For starters, I never feel quite entitled to anything. I bump into an empty chair; I apologize. A driver gives me the right of way; I wave as if he just gave me a kidney. So, when it comes to the environment, two sips from a disposable coffee cup at lunch and immediately I think I'm not worth the gas it'll take to get me home.

At best, I am stumbling in the right direction. I use cloth napkins, bundle every newspaper and use old toothbrushes to scrub grout. But I replace my sneakers when they wear out on the inside , for God's sake. I use low-phosphate detergent, but I failed miserably when I tried bathing with that black soap that's supposed to produce less bad stuff when it goes down the drain. It was like scrubbing with cardboard.

And then there's the man in my life. He doesn't so much recycle products as revive them from the dead. Our sinks are cluttered with used bars of hotel soap, and our kitchen drainboard routinely is filled with freshly washed baggies that predate cell phones.

It seems I attract the morally superior. It's as if I have a sign on my back that reads, No, Really, Kick Me Again. Please.

Last week, a woman at a reception took one look at the chicken nugget appetizer on my plate and shook her head.

"I'm a vegetarian," she announced. "I could never eat a living creature."

I was raised on fried Spam by parents with a family history of heart disease, so I'm thinking lean poultry is a sparkly miracle in my life. I didn't tell her that, though, because I had stopped chewing and was busy trying to figure out what exactly one does with a mouthful of murder victim.

Just once, I want to feel like a shiny shade of chartreuse when it comes to being green. That's why I am downright giddy to discover that Ireland has transformed its consumer culture by charging a tax of 33 cents per plastic bag at stores. Almost overnight, Irish shoppers have converted to carrying cloth bags.

So, I — ol' carnivore Connie, frothy with sudsy soap — am saying goodbye to plastic bags.

My 20-year-old daughter finds this new habit fairly mortifying.

For her, it's all about ensemble. She insists I must choose: I can wear my large-brimmed hat with the fake feather jutting out like a penknife, or I can loop a rainbow collection of canvas totes over my arm. Never, ever should I do this at the same time.

"Seriously, Mom, you look like a bag lady," she said in a voice I barely could hear because of the distance she was keeping at the grocery. I was at bananas; she was already in dairy.

"I don't care how I look," I shouted. She thanked me for stating the obvious and zipped over to the bread aisle.

When I started writing this column, there were 47,055,984,738 reasons to stop using plastic bags. That was the number of bags consumed so far in the world this year, according to the Web site ReusableBags.com.

I thought it was enough that I reused the plastic bags, but they still end up in the trash. The site lists all kinds of harrowing statistics, including this one: Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine life die every year after eating discarded plastic bags they mistake for food.

And this one: Plastic bags don't biodegrade. Instead, they break down into toxic bits that contaminate soil and waterways and enter the "food web" when animals eat them.

Around the world, billions of plastic bags end up as litter each year. Paper bags are an option but not the best one.

So, spitspot, I'm as merry as Miss Poppins as I carry the dozen or so cloth totes I've collected over the years from department stores, universities and hospitals. I even have one from a hospice, and oh, the conversations that bag can spark about living wills while you're waiting for a clerk who is old enough to ring up the shiraz.

I just checked that Web site again, and in the time it took me to write this column, 219,334,899 more plastic bags were consumed.

And you can't blame me for a single one of them.

I think I'll fry me some Spam.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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