RIVER CITY JOURNAL: REAL WORLD WASN'T ALWAYS MADE OF PLASTIC

It was something your mother said on the telephone while making plans for the Thanksgiving get-together that sparked a memory of the 1950s. It was just a passing remark, one any hostess might make when anticipating a lot of relatives and a big holiday meal.

This fall your mother decided to redecorate the entire house where she lives in your favorite hometown in the Ozark hills to the west. One of the big changes was new wall-to-wall carpeting throughout. The old carpet was a color and texture suitable for small spills. As with any floor covering, there comes a time when you stop fretting about all but the really large messes.

New carpeting is different. For a while, at least, you want to keep it perfect. When your older son was younger he had a friend whose parents built a new house. When it was finished, all visitors were required to remove their shoes before entering, even though they weren't Japanese at all. To one degree or another, everyone has a desire to keep new things new for as long as possible.

The new carpeting at your mother's house is a gorgeous, creamy Berber. So you can imagine her concern that a lot of relatives would be eating cranberry salad, turkey gravy and mincemeat pie while balancing plates on their laps.

"Maybe I'll just cover everything in plastic," she said on the phone. No, no, you insisted. Modern carpeting is easy to clean. Besides, worrying about potential messes doesn't put you in the right frame of mind for a big family to-do. Certainly not this family.

But the image that jumped into your mind was of those wonder years, the 1950s, when plastic was coming into its own as part of the American culture, along with ball point pens, 45 rpm records and Tupperware.

Remember? Surely you do: The clear, plastic seat covers that protected the real seat covers in the family automobile. Or the clear, plastic that protected the real fabric on the sofa from the detritus of family life.

While clear plastic served its purpose, it also kept you from ever fully enjoying the real seat covers or the real sofa fabric. You wonder if there isn't a place where 1957 Ford Fairlanes go to spend eternity, some weed-infested lot rusted frames still hold smashed windows and old crankcases still ooze trickles of oil -- but the seat covers look as new as the day the cars came off the showroom floor, thanks to their protective plastic covering.

You have always equated paying top dollar for a new automobile sporting clear, plastic seat covers with eating garden vegetables from the cellar during the winter.

Remember? Your mother would send you to the underground cellar with its shelves of canned vegetables and fruits and the big bin of potatoes. Your instructions were to look for the potatoes that were turning bad, because they needed to be eaten before they rotted. Thus you went through an entire winter of eating ready-to-rot potatoes, because the system worked: By not eating the best potatoes, they lasted a long, long time, and you didn't go hungry.

There you have it: Human nature in its finest hour means sitting on plastic-covered seats whose lush softness you will never touch and eating vegetables on the edge of extinction in order to preserve nature's bounty in the dead of winter. Ah, how resourceful mankind is.

When you think about, that's something to be thankful for.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.