Who Knew?

Today I was working with one of my high school students when he suddenly held out a pack of gum. "Want a piece?" he asked.

For some reason, I said yes. I cannot remember the last time I have chewed a piece of gum. I was never a big gum chewer even in the days when it wouldn't have been notable, but really, it's been years. And as you will see, I have not purchased a pack of gum in what might be a decade.

I took a piece and unwrapped it as my student watched. "You know," he said, "You don't actually need to do that anymore." 

"What?" I said, genuinely confused.

"The wrapper. You can just eat it. It dissolves into the gum as you chew." 

This particular student is a bit of a prankster, and I assumed he was kidding. "Ha, ha," I said.

"No, really," he insisted. All the gum is like that now. Except for Juicy Fruit. That has a foil wrapper. Don't try chewing that." Thanks, I said in my head, wryly, displeased that my student, while entrusting his higher education to me clearly thought on some level I was a dimwit of extravagant proportions, dumb enough to eat metal.

I watched as he popped a wrapped piece in his own mouth, chewed for a few seconds, and then proudly announced that any trace of the wrapper was gone, absorbed fully into the chewed wad of gum in his mouth, which he knew well enough not to show me. It took all of my will-power, my complete desire not to sound like somebody's biddy great-aunt, not to say, "Well, what do you know? Isn't that something!"

I am tempted to write something here about my thoughts on my fortieth birthday, which will take place at the end of this year, and the sense that on some level as time marches on we are forced to let some paths stay gated, some information closed off. But I won't--I tried, a few times, and it was all generic rubbish, immediately identifiable as such, unlike the rubbish that I see so clearly a day after the fact and feel too ashamed to conspicuously remove.

I will say for the benefit of those who, like me, have been living in the dark ages, that it is entirely possible that but for this chance encounter this afternoon, I may never have known that today, in 2009--brave new world that it is--gum wrappers, the non-foil ones, anyway, are entirely edible.