On opening a Kershaw Park doggie-poop bag

—Yrs Trly walks his Irish-Setter Sunday mornings at Kershaw Park north of Canandaigua Lake.
Kershaw has a rule about picking up after your dog, and provides biodegradable doggie-poop bags in dispensers.
Long ago my aquacise instructor and I walked our dogs at Kershaw. Had I not been with her, I probably woulda avoided a poop-bag.
Long story; related more to my not wanting to make a scene. Now I get a poop-bag if I don’t have one already.
But they are nearly impossible to open. They’re plastic, I guess, designed to fit flat in the dispenser. It’s two pieces of plastic mated together, and very hard to separate.
26 long years ago Yrs Trly had a stroke. It was caused by an undiagnosed heart-defect long since repaired. It was caused by a patent foramen ovale (PFO).
Prior to birth a passage exists between the upper ventricles of your heart. It allows you to use your mother’s oxygen.
After birth, breathing on your own, the hole is supposed to seal closed. Mine didn’t, and it passed a blood-clot to my brain, a thrombosis (thrombotic stroke).
Patent foramen ovale’s are fairly common.
“Why in the world would a runner have a stroke?” my doctors asked. (I was running back then.) Can you say “P-F-O?”
Before repair I was tested to see if I needed bypasses. It’s open-heart surgery.
None needed. I was a paragon of heart-health except for my P-F-O.
One effect of such a disaster is disconnect from reality. I had this after my wife died too. I had it perhaps three-or-more years after my stroke, and only now, seven years after my wife died, are things becoming real again.
It’s like nothing is real. Things happen with which I can’t connect. I do things with which I can’t connect. I try to explain this to anyone and I bomb.
“Things don’t just disappear,” said a friend to me long ago. But to one unattached to reality, it seems they do.
Pieces of dog-kibble drop to the floor and disappear, so why look for ‘em?
That’s my reaction to Kershaw’s doggie-poop bag. I try and try, but I can’t get it open. So why bother? Let it go.
This is the way things are to a person unconnected to reality.
Years ago, before my stroke, my younger brother and I set to load our motorcycles on a trailer for a trip to my sister in VA.
His motorbike fell over in the street, breaking a brake-lever.
“Well, I guess I can’t take my motorcycle,” he said.
“Baloney!” I said.”All we hafta do is engineer something to mimic that brake-lever.”
We grabbed a piece of 3/4-inch copper tubing, then hacksawed it to about 3&1/2 inches. We hammered the tubing onto the stub of the broken brake-lever, then wrapped it with black electrical-tape.
“In business,” I said. We loaded his motorbike.
He replaced that brake-lever after we got back.
Disconnects with reality make such repairs beyond-the-pale.
I can’t get the poop-bag open. Such is life. Let it go.
I tried again later at home, knowing if the bag is pre-opened I can use it.
It occurred to me to wet my thumb and forefinger to friction the matted panels.
VIOLA; worked like a charm.
This is a major step forward to someone like me still off in the ozone somewhat.