Road Apples by Tim Sanders
May 17, 2010

Straw men
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About a week ago my son David and I took his mom out for dinner. As we were waiting for our food to arrive, I looked across the table at Marilyn’s lovely face, the face belonging to my wife of 42 years and the mother of my children, and a profound thought flitted into my brain. “I’ll bet,” I said to myself, “I could hit her right in the nose if I were to shoot my drinking straw wrapper at her.”

I could, and I did. I don’t like to brag, but when it comes to shooting those sanitary drinking straw wrappers, I take a back seat to no one. I always elevate properly for distance and allow for windage, and, if my target is moving, I can mentally plot my wrapper’s trajectory with uncanny accuracy. If our nation were ever to go to war with an enemy nation, and both sides were armed only with wrapped drinking straws, I could be a brigadier general in charge of artillery.

I think the compulsion to shoot straw wrappers across a table is mostly a male thing. Certainly a woman may shoot a straw wrapper from time to time, when she thinks no one is looking or during one of those alarming hormonal shifts, but with guys the compulsion is almost always there, bubbling under the surface. We may try to fight it off, but the sight of that neatly wrapped straw sitting beside our drink is more than we can resist.

If you, like me, are a deep thinker, I imagine you’ve often thought about how difficult it must have been for men to sit, unarmed, at a restaurant table in the old days, before the sanitary drinking straw wrapper was invented. What did they shoot at each other? Fork loads of mashed potatoes? English peas launched from teaspoons? Knotted cloth napkins? This kind of speculation leads us to wondering about the development of the drinking straw.

Historians tell us that drinking straws were first used around 6,000 BC by the primitive inhabitants of the Euphrates River basin, who were known, I believe, as either the Euphoniums or the Euphemisms. Dwelling along the banks of that river, where wandering bands of nomads regularly scrubbed their goats, de-loused their camels, and emptied their chamber pots upstream, the Euphonics had to depend on bottled water, which was collected several miles downstream and labeled as “spring water” to fool the Eukelalies. The Euclideans, or Eukranians, or whatever they were, gathered long, hollow reeds from the river bank and used the “straws” to extract the very last drop of precious “spring water” from their bottles. Why they called them “straws” rather than “reeds” is still a mystery.

Over the following centuries there were copper straws, iron straws, and glass straws, but they did not become popular in Europe until much later. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous 1498 painting “The Last Supper” depicts no drinking straws at all, and while an earlier work entitled “The Next to the Last Supper” appears to show St. Bartholomew sipping his wine through a bronze straw, many experts contend it is not a straw at all, only a stain on the canvas. Almost 400 years later, however, the European porcelain drinking straw was in common use. In Edouard Manet’s famous painting “Luncheon on the Grass,” the first thing people generally notice is the fact that there are two fully clothed Frenchmen having a picnic on the grass and paying not a lick of attention to the completely naked lady sitting next to them. There is no explanation as to why she’s naked, or why the two men aren’t interested. One of the men seems distracted by another lady bathing in a lake in the background, but she isn’t naked, which makes you wonder about Frenchmen. But the second thing you will notice about that painting is the fact that there are three glasses lying on the ground, containing porcelain drinking straws and little cocktail umbrellas.

In America, the first paper drinking straw was invented in 1888 by Thomas Alva Edison. Oh sure, some people claim that a guy named Marvin Stone patented the first paper straw, but since Edison invented everything else, including the phonograph, the light bulb, the motion picture camera, the projector, the steamboat, the cotton gin, gravity, the Pocket Fisherman and the Veg-O-Matic, he may as well get credit for the paper drinking straw, too. It will make history tests much easier for students in danger of being held back. Whoever invented them, the first paper straws were made by winding strips of paper around a pencil and sealing the resulting tube with mucilage, which unfortunately in early models made user’s lips stick together.

When I was in elementary school, back during the Taft administration, a plastic milk token would get you a little carton of milk and a paper straw. These cartons of milk, and the accompanying crackers, were intended to keep us all quiet and occupied, which they always did for at least ten or fifteen seconds. That was how long it took us to start shooting our sanitary straw wrappers across the room. The air was often thick with those little missiles. The straws served other purposes, too. All second-grade boys knew how to flatten the end of a fresh straw, trim the corners off with those little rounded safety scissors, and then use it as a duck call. Teachers always hated that. By third grade we had outgrown the duck calls and graduated to Advanced Paper Wad Shooting. It was also great fun extracting somebody’s straw from his milk carton, crimping the bottom end, and sticking it back into the carton while he was preoccupied fetching his pencil which you’d just accidentally sent skittering across the floor. I pulled that very trick on Pat Kelley one November morning, and thoroughly enjoyed watching his eyeballs bug out due to the resulting suction failure. The next day he got even by cleverly shooting an entire mouthful of milk through his straw down the back of my neck. For some reason, he thought that was hilarious.

Today most drinking straws are plastic. But plastic, paper, or porcelain, considering the enjoyment straws have given mankind over the centuries, I fully expect that legislation will soon be passed outlawing them. You know, as a health risk or something. In the meantime, you need to use your straws wisely, and put a few aside in case you have relatives over for dinner. Make sure they have nice, tight sanitary wrappers.

The straws, I mean.