Care packages

Tonight we got a care package full of awesomeness: Halloween and fall candy, fall-flavored tea, and fall decorations.

Since we had candy corn, and it was Date Night (a double special occasion) we decided to break out one of my precious hoard of Pillsbury cake mixes — white — and a stashed can of Pillsbury white frosting to make cupcakes. I sit on a sizable pile of these American baking ingredients like Smaug nestles into a mound of gold. And I guard them in a similar manner. But occasionally I can pry them from my own grip and actually use them — when it’s the right moment.

I believe the cake mix and frosting may be items that I put in a care package I actually sent to myself from the States this summer before we came back to Europe.

That reminded me of the stressful circumstances involved with sending a care package to myself.
First was the shopping for the care package. Having lived for three years without certain American goodies I have no access to in Europe, I went a little overboard in buying one or two of everything that I’ve missed. What I thought were a “few things” turned into four double-sacked Wal-Mart plastic bags that were quite heavy. As I walked out of the store, grunting in my struggle to carry the 20-pound bags to my car, my greed battled with my frugality = stress.

Second, was trying to fit everything into one box that wasn’t too heavy. Naturally, that wasn’t possible, so I left two grocery bags in my parents’ closet with the intention of sending money later to ship the leftover items to me in the fall or winter.

Third, I had a bit of a war with myself over two particular items: two cans of cooking spray.

Europeans don’t have or use cooking spray. I assume they slather everything they eat in slimy yellow cooking oil or larded up butter. Me, I prefer my calorie-free, light spritz of no-stick man-made chemical on my pots and pans. And so I really wanted to get a couple of cans back to my kitchen.

In the past, I threw a few cans in my checked luggage. Then I’d gotten to the airport and saw pictures of aerosol cans on the warning signs before you get to the check-in counter, proclaiming that anything pressurized is a suitcase-b--- waiting to happen and if you pack one of these house-wife-grenades in your luggage, you’re dooming yourself and all your fellow passengers to a fiery death when that explosive goes off in the baggage hold of the airplane over the ocean so that if the flames don’t burn you to death, the sharks will get you when you land.

Before I’d seen that sign, I didn’t know my harmless little calorie-free cooking spray was a sinister weapon. (It’s not like you could carry one with you while you’re out jogging and spray it on a would-be attacker and then run away.) And already having it in my possession, inside my suitcase, was like a point of no return.

As I marched past that warning sign at check-in, I rationalized to myself — surely women for decades have smuggled pressurized cans of hairspray or mousse into their suitcases and no harm has been done. I can’t have been the first to carry an aerosol can onto a plane. Besides, these are comparatively small. And I guess if it’s really that bad, security will find it when they screen the bags and take it out, right?

I checked that bag, keeping as innocent a look on my face as I could manage, while the checker handed back my passport and boarding passes and waved me on to my gate.

Then I got a sick feeling in my stomach. As I struggled through security, I remembered the time that I accidentally got through airport security with a full canister of pepper spray in my carry-on because I’d forgotten it was in there.

“What if the baggage checkers don’t find the cooking spray and it really does blow up and rip a hole in the baggage hold of our plane and we all die?” I was thinking to myself.

I have a tendency to imagine the worst that could possibly happen, and sometimes even worse than that. I tried to reason with myself that I was being ridiculous. A little can of oil surely couldn’t take down an airliner, otherwise terrorists would use cooking spray as weapons instead of C4, right?
I sat rigidly through the entire flight, worried and waiting for something awful to happen. When we finally landed, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and when I got home, was thrilled that my cooking spray was still in my suitcase.

However, I didn’t think I could go through that anxiety ever again, so I ruled out packing cans of pressurized cooking spray in my luggage anymore.

Thus, sending it to myself in a box. “This will be an anxiety-free experience,” I thought to myself.
I thought wrong.

After standing approximately three days in line at the US post office with my heavy box of cooking and eating items, including two precious cans of cooking spray, I finally got to the shipping desk.
That’s when I saw the giant poster on the wall next to the desk with shadowy silhouette drawings of items that are forbidden in shipping packages going international. The silhouettes included bottles of nail polish, firecrackers, gasoline, weapons and… aerosol cans.

NOOOOooooooooooooo!!!

The sign proceeded to explain that if any of these items were shipped and caused damage in the shipping process, the shipper would be liable for fines of thousands of dollars and up to 5 years in jail.

The postal worker was filling out paperwork to attach to my boxes while I looked quickly away from the poster. But I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. I knew. I was now informed. The man didn’t ask me whether my boxes contained aerosol cans, or anything else dangerous. I tried to shape my face into an expression that did not suggest I was sending weaponized cooking fat in my box.

The anxiety was tightening the pit of my stomach. Was going to prison worth two bottles of cooking spray? Hmmm. I had to think about this. And I was running out of time. The man was attaching the document to the box and now he was weighing it.

Then I remembered that another hazardous item on the poster was nail polish. Suddenly I relaxed. It was ridiculous to suggest that tiny bottles of nail polish would explode in shipping and down an entire airliner. Surely the same logic could apply to 10-inch bottles of oil. It should be fine.
I shipped the package. Then I walked away.

Then it hit me — what if the bottles didn’t explode, but some postal employee had to open the box for some reason and found the bottles? What then? Would they track me down and prosecute me for endangering their lives?

I felt generally uneasy for the next few weeks until we arrived in Europe and found our boxes had preceded us. I ripped open the cardboard and tape and exhaled heavily when I saw my bottles were inside and were intact.

Then I found a piece of paper in the box that I had not put in there. It was yellow and had block print letters on it that said the following: “Please remove moss.”

When I had been packing the box, I had grabbed some plastic from my parents’ closet to fill in some open spaces in the box, and a little bit of dried flower arrangements had gotten knocked off a wreath my mom had stored in the closet. The bits of dusty, crisp flower petals and leaves had fallen into the box.

Apparently the inspectors looking inside my box felt that these bits of dried leaves were much more dangerous than the pressurized cooking spray I had packed along with them.

Dangerous "moss" aside, with all the anxiety involved with getting cooking spray to Europe, I don’t believe I will try this again in the future.