Curses! Some Things Last Forever and Ever and . . .

Fallon Evans, a professor of English literature, writes that he has had a vision of the hereafter. It is not a vision of his death, which he expects to be very ordinary.

Fallon believes he is destined to have an ordinary life and death. He explains that he spent World War II as a soldier stationed in Kansas, and the most extraordinary thing that happened to him in that time was having three changes in uniform of the day before breakfast one morning. That’s the sort of exercise the officers think up to keep the troops on their toes when there isn’t any combat.

Fallon’s vision is of himself lying in his casket, after all the rituals have taken place.

“The undertaker has approached to lower the lid and screw in the last screws and my wife has come to take her last look.

“And just as the lid closes, she will see, way down in one corner of the casket, one of those white plastic, non-biodegradable kernels that mail order houses use to cushion the purchase within the cardboard box. You know, the little walnut shaped things that flow out of the box and under tables and chairs . . . that show up in the kitchen weeks after, that always appear after the trash truck has left . . . those dratty little things that you can never get rid of?

“And my wife will sigh and think, ‘They beat him in death just as they did in life.’ ”

I have no such vision, since I don’t intend to be buried. With my claustrophobia it would kill me. I’m going up in smoke.

But I do expect, until my dying day, to be pestered, teased, pursued, beleaguered and frustrated by those little plastic pellets he describes.

They are undoubtedly the most fiendish invention of the packaging industry, which is by all odds the most fiendish of all industries.

I have seen a lot of them. My wife enjoys mail-order shopping, so our living room is never quite free of them. As Evans says, they flow out of the box and under tables and chairs, where they resist recapture, only to turn up months later.

He calls them kernels, which indeed they are. Some may look like walnuts, but the ones I see are more often round or shaped like peanuts. They have almost no weight. They are used to fill in the empty spaces in packages. When the package is opened they “flow” out, as Evans says. They are light on the air and they have an affinity for clothing. They cling to one’s pant legs, and if you brush them off they float away and land somewhere else, like elusive flies.

You can not pick them up by the handful. They flow out of your hand and hide under the sofa. They seem to have minds of their own. There is nothing to do but curse them.

As Evans notes, they are non-biodegradable, another bad mark against them. Unlike Evans, when he is laid in his casket, they will last forever. When I see one on the rug, defiant, mocking me, I am not heartened by the knowledge that it will outlast me. It will never disintegrate.

I don’t even know what these little monsters are called, or who manufacturers them. I only know that they are a curse on mankind, and one of the many pernicious products of our high technology.

I believe I have already written of the impossibility of opening packaged goods--even a loaf of bread. Fingernails and teeth are helpless against the plastic seals. They say, “Tear here,” but nothing less than a knife or a pair of pliers can undo their indestructible embrace.

I am rather given to dry cereals, which my doctor says were meant for herd animals to eat. I am discouraged, though, by the impossibility of getting at the cereal through that plastic inner sack without risking the loss of a finger by using a butcher knife. Even my wife, who is much better at these things than I am, gives up. Sheer strength will not pull those sealed flaps apart. The people who think these things up should be boiled in non-biodegradable oil.

I occasionally receive review books from publishers. I despair every time I pick up one of those brown cardboard “jiffy” packages with the tongue you are suppose to pull to peel the package like a banana. Either I cannot find the end of the tongue or when I peel it, it doesn’t open the package. Usually I end up using a large pair of shears or a large knife.

As for medicines, the ingenious locking devices they think up to make the bottles inaccessible to children are nothing less than satanic. Even a plastic bottle of aspirin is harder to crack than a safe. And the irony of this elaborate precaution is that children don’t seem to have any trouble opening them.

As for those little plastic peanuts, Evans is right: the only way to get rid of them permanently is to lock them in a casket and bury them.