This all started this morning when the Voice from the Kitchen who has been hoarse and sniffling for three days now asked me to buy some Kleenex on my way back from a presentation that I was giving.
I can't tell you how many stupid things ran through my coconut about Kleenex and what I remembered of them. One of the things that has stuck with me is the cartoon that I saw when I was a little boy about a baby in diapers who had emptied a full box of Kleenex in the frustration that he developed as he tried to take only one tissue out of the box at a time. The room was full of Kleenex tissues that the baby had thrown around in frustration. Try as I might I have not been able to get Mr. Google to find that cartoon for me. So, I settle for this picture because as my thoughts jingled and jangled through my head today, one actually captured my mother's story about a friend of hers who had been subjected to the indignation of having pigeon droppings besmirch her fine dress as she was walking to church one Sunday morning. As the story used to go, the lady pronounced the name of the substance in disgust as she furiously struggled to wipe it off by repeatedly wetting her thumb with her tongue and rubbing, and wetting and rubbing and wetting some more...Yyeccchhh! My mother insisted that the story was true and she could never tell it without having to interrupt the flow of the description to succumb to waves of screeching laughter.
So, you see what having to buy a box of Kleenex can do to an old guy with a memory. But there's more. Oh yeah. I got to thinking about the baby and his problem of taking only one tissue out of the box and being done with it. So, after I found the picture and camped on the focus of the "Thought", I decided that I would do some research about the history of Kleenex. Mostly, I wondered when the "pop-up" feature had been invented. I found out that it was 1929. Youch! Nearly 85 years ago. Hey, that's older than I am! But you know what? I also found out that Kimberly-Clark, the manufacturer, never thought of it as a nose juice recipient/wiper. Nope. They made it to wipe cold cream off actresses' faces. Really, that's what the book says. Slowly but surely the word got around that ordinary people liked the idea of the Kleenex doing their nose work and saving them the trouble of washing and ironing handkerchiefs. It wasn't until around 1930, six whole years after the introduction of the product that the company started to advertise it as an alternative to handkerchiefs.
But hey, it gets better. I read somewhere that very early on in history, the Japanese had found a way to treat and soften a kind of seaweed so that they could take care of their runny nose and then throw the seaweed down on the ground rather than put it in their pocket. Those who could afford that luxury thought they were cool and they enjoyed showing up the poor folks who were still using their hands and their sleeves. For the record; throw a Kleenex on the ground in Japan these days and it's the slammer for you, dude!
See how times change? Finally, and I know that this is going to kill you: How many of you actually took time to teach your beloved children how to use a handkerchief properly? Hmmm! Hard to be honest with that one, right? I pity those poor kids. I'll bet that you even forbade them to wipe their nose on their sleeve. I'll leave you with the picture that results from those two previous sentences...
I don't dare write it in public...
I think I'll just let myself out the back door, slinkily and quietly...
Come back tomorrow, if you dare...
No comments:
Post a Comment