On Proper Helium Etiquette

Still cleaning out the old essays.

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We recently had an event that spawned the arrival of Mylar helium balloons. Fortunately, our crowd is not of the Have a Hannah Montana Inflatable Item for Your Birthday crowd, so we get a couple cards and a gift for your normal gift bearing holidays, and I’m man enough to forget the standard Wuv holidays, so we don’t deal with them on a regular basis.

Now cards are keepsakes, at least in our household or at least when they’re in my reach. You can easily put them into boxes or binders to save them for some far away days in the future when you’ve got nothing to do an empty house full of old people’s furniture, wallpaper, and cats. Cards fit easily into these storage devices. Little letters, little notes, each of these you can unfold and review, running your fingers over the creased paper. But Mylar balloons are another story altogether.

I’ve worked in the industry, tangentially, so I know how to deflate the balloons: you simply insert a straw into the neck of the balloon so that it opens the little valve and squeezing the helium out, or the helium and air mixture, or whatever mix exists after a couple of weeks in the wild. Sure, that’s easy, and it makes sense enough if you’re in the industry and you can reinflate unsold balloons the next time the season rolls around, hoping that your dated stars and designs will become retro enough to sell then.

But what do you do with a deflated mylar balloon in the household? I can’t imagine hanging them flat on the wall like old LP covers. Certainly, you’ll never reinflate them with helium, as you’ll probably never bring home a tank full of that noble gas whose natural supply is waning. Just blowing them up won’t recapture the magic uselessness of the original, and bagging up that carbon dioxide won’t reduce your footprint a toe.

I guess the only responsible thing to do with a helium-filled balloon is to do what PEBA would recommend: returning it to the wild before it’s too weak to travel to the helium balloon spawning grounds back east (that is, downwind). I only hope I’m not too late, because all of the neighbors down the block will know the source of the newly liberated “It’s a Boy!” balloons that snag in their trees, and this very piece will shoot down my story of an accidental balloon-escaped-when-I-opened-the-door-and-I-tried-to-lure-it-back-in-with-balloon-treats story.

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