Mm Mm Good ... The Thin Edge of Dignity

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Dick Weinman is an AARP Volunteer and an Assisted Living Guru

You sniff a steaming bowl of tomato soup, its bouquet rises in your nostrils.  “Mm! Mm! Good!” Of course. You know that. It’s been “. . . drummed in your dear little ear” since the nineteen thirties when Joseph Campbell’s soup company broadcast its first radio commercial.

But what’s an Mm! Mm! Good! bowl of steaming soup without those crushed Nabisco Saltine crackers: Mm! Mm! Double Good!  And you can easily smash those salty delights – if you can get at them, safely protected from a crushing death by cellophane wrap. Easy as pie – unless you are hand handicapped like me.

Each tempting package of glistening crystals of salt atop the temptingly speckled wafer is sealed away until the tiny sliver of paper on its right corner is pulled. Then the crackers can be released from their transparent, protective cellophane, ready to munch one-at-a-time while slurping soup, or crushed to shreds to drizzle on the Mm! Mm! Good! liquefied and puréed tomatoes AND high fructose corn syrup, wheat flour, water,  salt, potassium chloride, flavoring, citric acid, lower sodium natural sea salt, ascorbic acid (vitamin c), monopotassium phosphate, and celery extract.

The problem I have is that my stiff, inflexible fingers – the consequence of the auto crash that disabled me – can’t grasp the thin, slippery, plastic ribbon. The solution is to use a different body part than the finger – I use my teeth (Is that considered a singular: “body part,” or plural “ parts?”)

I slide the package between my lips, anticipating the crunchy crunch of the crushed crackers floating atop the Mm! Mm! Good! in the liquefied, pureed, and additive-laden water and tomato paste product out-of-the-can, called tomato soup.

Uh Oh! Despite my biting, the package won’t open. I try again, but I gnash this time. A sliver of cellophane lodges between my incisors. I spit it out and re-gnash, resulting in another lodged piece of the waxy stuff.  I give up and ask my friend to open the package.

My disability won the day – but I can’t wait to try to unseal the plastic bag of

potato chips with my next burger.