Paper Towels

I find it jarring when my parents or sisters stop using products I grew up with. What is a family, in the end, but the group of people you share your brand loyalties with? It feels weird when that sacred contract gets broken.

At some point after I left home, for example, my mother switched from Bounty paper towels to Viva paper towels, and I have felt uneasy about it ever since. Setting aside the question of which product is better (though the answer, clearly, is sturdy, efficient Bounty as opposed to oversoft, trying-to-be-fancy Viva), such changes throw into disarray my concept of the sort of people I thought we were.

I mean, what’s next? Are we going to soften our fabrics with Bounce instead of Downy? Brush our teeth with Colgate instead of Crest? Wipe our behinds with Quilted Northern rather than Charmin? Eat a sandwich made with Skippy peanut butter like a pack of barbarians?

Excuse me but I was under the impression we had all tacitly agreed that CHOOSY MOMS CHOOSE JIF.

And so I still buy Bounty when I do the shopping. My husband, Frank, on the other hand, is liable to go with whatever is cheapest. He must have been the last one to purchase paper towels, by the way, because the kind we’ve got on the kitchen counter right now are neither adequately quilted nor quicker in the picker-upper department.

Maybe I watched too many TV commercials as a child. Maybe Frank has the right idea, confining his brand loyalties to precisely two products: Goya Adobo all-purpose spice mix and Vicks VapoRub. To hear him describe in reverent tones the all-powerful properties of either one, you’d think he was an elder of Wakanda talking about vibranium.

To tell you the truth, I’m a little envious. I’d love to inspire the same level of blind devotion. I could get attacked by a rabid raccoon and Frank would be like, “Zac, I think you should apologize.” But the Vicks people could make any claim at all—they could propose VapoRub as a cure for my festering rabies bites—and Frank would nod and be like, “Well, sure, it’s mentholated.”

Unfortunately, though, he does not extend the same ride-or-die mentality to everything. Namely, me. He’s generally on my side and all. But he’s too pragmatic and shrewd to supply unthinking support when I’m wrong. Which is a shame.

And a violation of the core values of his hometown, Chicago—a city whose residents, in my experience, tend to prize loyalty above such trivialities as morality and common sense. Chicagoans stood by both Mayor Daleys all those years, after all. Not to mention the Cubs. And the Bears. And any random cousin who calls and tells them to hurry over with their crowbar ‘cause some jagoff needs to be taught a lesson for parking in a dibs spot by da Jewels on Pulaski over by dere.

As a matter of fact, I’m fairly certain Frank’s own mother would help me hide a body if I asked her to right now, and I’m only an in-law. I, for one, think that’s touching. And I hope she feels that I would do the same in return. At the very least, I could provide a solid recommendation for the best kind of paper towels to soak up all the blood.