My mother had a drawer full of them in the 60s and 70s: These little things like shower caps, circles of plastic sheet of a sort you’d recognize from shower curtains, with an elastic gather around the edge. I actually called them “shower caps” in my head, and we used them to close half-used cans of mandarin orange segments and mushrooms. I didn’t think much about them until a year or two ago, when yogurt containers stopped coming with closable lids. I don’t toss back a whole 6 oz container of yogurt every morning, so this was a major irritation. In our climate, things dry out fast in the fridge, so putting something over an opened yogurt container is essential.
For awhile there were shower caps, QuickCovers from Saran, but only the tiniest ones were applicable to yogurt, and even those were a little on the big side. We haven’t seen QuickCovers in stores in some time, and have been reduced to fighting with the plastic wrap to close a yogurt container for tomorrow. That’s an irritation to reckon with.
I always say: If you’re going to allow yourself to be irritated, be irritated at something trivial. Irritation then won’t ruin your game.
So I was out in the garage earlier today, putting my junkbox telescope together for a quick trip down to the KOA Pueblo South, to do a little summer stargazing. In the bottom of an ancient Argus slide projector case that my father gave me when he got his new projector in 1962, there were a lot of things (though not what I was really looking for) including some old eyepieces, a Herschel wedge, and…one of those old shower caps that I’d raided from my mother’s kitchen drawer in 1971. I had used it to put over the tops of eyepieces so that they wouldn’t get scratched rattling around loose in the bottom of a slide projector case. I hadn’t touched it in 30-odd years, so it was still in pretty good shape. (See photo above.)
It’s an obviously useful thing. Why aren’t they made anymore? Does everybody really eat six whole ounces of yogurt every time they have any at all? Am I really reaching this hard for Contra entries?
No. I’m serious. If you know where such things live, or even what they’re called, let me know. I’m tired of wrestling with the Saran wrap.
