My aunt thinks that plastic is the solution of this century. The more plastic the better, as far as she's concerned. She likes polyester clothing, too, because it's practically like plastic. It even smells like plastic when she does her wash. The fashion wave that crested in the seventies with double knit polyester pant suits submerged her, and she hasn't come to take a breath since. "Polyester is the key to women's freedom, it's the end of ironing," says my aunt Leonor as she hangs up her patterned pastel pants and matching vests.

She thinks of food, and she thinks plastic. She loves chicken, so when she returns from her travels in Mexico, she eats at Kentucky Fried Chicken. "They put it plastic, not like the restaurant chicken from Canatlán that gives everybody diarrhea," she insisted. "Gringos are so very clean that if something doesn't have a plastic scent, it's dirty."

After an earthquake in 1989, my aunt was beside herself with pride, because everyone's dishes and glasses had broken falling from kitchen shelves. But hers were plastic, and that's why she told me,"You see, dear, that's why, if I were you, and were setting up my kitchen after getting married to the man of my dreams, I'd buy plastic glasses, so I wouldn't have to be afraid of dropping them." She started selling Tupperware shortly before the big earthquake in eighty-nine, and was ready to evangelize her many friends and acquaintances who'd had their memories tumble and shatter on the floor.

For my last Saint's Day, my aunt gave me a big plastic doll. He's good at holding me when I cry, because he doesn't worry about getting his shirt stained, and he doesn't get upset at seeing a woman cry. He listens with clean ears to my new poems. When I want a son, I call him any boys name. When I want to make love, he listens. When I want a friend he caresses me with his eyes and with his sleepy plastic hands. When I'm ready to sleep, he's sleepy, too. He's flexible, with the patience of his kind.

My aunt treats sicknesses very seriously. She received new plastic arteries when her heart was sick, and she was happy. While I helped her to the bathroom after the operation, she said,"If plastic hadn't come along, these doctors would still be working in the Dark Ages."

All her shoes are plastic, too. She doesn't like leather. "How can you put an animal's skin right on top of your own skin ?" In Mexico, she likes to wear plastic sandals, like a rancho woman, so her feet stay dry even when she steps in a puddle.

She suggested that books ought to be made of plastic so that they wouldn't get wet when we cried over them. This would also solve the problem of the ashes from burned paper. She says the paper ashes are the wishes that the dead put in dreams, and that we breathe from them when we fall asleep in love.

If I write a book one day, I'd like it printed on plastic so that lovers can cry on it, kids can play with it, grandmothers can slip through the clutches of thieves, and so that women can leave it open on the table as a splash guard for when they serve dinner or slam the coffee down, or wash dishes while reading it. Most of all, I'd like to give my aunt a book in the most beautiful and sacred plastic, in which I tell her about the best man I know, the doll she gave me for my Saint's Day.