Some times I just need to be hit upside the head. Such a time occurred last week.

I’m gratified to be living an old-fashioned childhood summer, one where I sleep late, walk to the nearest corner grocery to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, bike to my friends’ houses, eat well, flow from one thing to the next, and invariably at some point end up at the beach. Days stretch long into night. Nothing is hurried. It’s absolutely glorious.

My only responsibility is my dog, Banjo, a shaggy French sheepdog who adores me. He keeps me company with his chatter and his songs.

When we go on one of our daily constitutionals I never fail to bring a plastic bag, just in case. It’s always a plastic grocery bag, one of those awful environmental hazards that have somehow become indispensable in our lives. I mindlessly reach for it, and if I do any thinking at all it’s that I’m doing good by recycling this awful stuff, using it twice before submitting it to the landfill where it takes hundreds of years to decompose.

Well, last week (much to my delight and eventual consternation) I found myself running out of plastic bags. I’m being diligent, you see, taking canvas bags with me whenever I go shopping, so I don’t bring home plastic bags any more. So, what to do about Banjo’s poo?

That’s when I started to dissect the dilemma, realizing how much this easy habit had deluded my thinking. It’s ridiculous, of course, to wrap something as wonderfully biodegradable as an animal’s poo in plastic that doesn’t biodegrade at all, then bury the whole thing in a mountain of garbage. (We do the same thing with disposable diapers). The wisest course of civil action is to pick up the poo in some sanitary manner and flush it down the toilet. But you can’t flush a plastic bag, too.

Rinsing out a shit-streaked bag isn’t something I care to bring into my daily life. That’s just too much attention to poo. What to do?

Buy poo bags! I got mine at a pet store for about 6 cents a bag. Made from cornstarch, they readily biodegrade. The manufacturer urges you to put used poo bags in the compost, but I’m leery of that advice.

If you have two compost piles (as I do), you can dedicate one to flowers and shrubbery, and one to vegetables and fruits. Poo bags go in the one for flowers and shrubbery. Too many unsavory items go down a dog’s gullet. Best to keep the result off human food.

So, no more plastic grocery bags for me. That’s one huge habit licked. If we all did that, our reliance on petroleum would dwindle significantly, and we’d go a long ways toward ridding the planet of the now ubiquitous plastic bag.

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