Well, aside from having given birth twice, I spent an afternoon a couple of years ago having the biggest trauma of my life: buying a lunchbox for Henry to toddle off to kindergarten with at the end of the summer. Choices, choices, choices! I never realized. I go into Wal-Mart, thinking the choices will be between blue, red, and blue-and-red plaid, but no! Nothing is that easy in this age of relentless commercialization. They had, I am not kidding you, two entire aisles (well, one aisle, but both entire sides) of nothing but lunchboxes.

To top it off, most of them aren't even boxes anymore! Some are boxes, some look like glorified paper bags, and some are sort of a zippered box thing on bottom and a Velcroed paper bag thing on top. So there's the first option: what shape do you want?

Next you decide what kind of movie character you want emblazoned on your child's lunchbox for the next year, after which point you'll be obliged to buy a new lunchbox for the sole reason that the one you'd bought originally is now passé ("No one carries Pocahontas boxes anymore!"). You have your choice between a) insipid/girly (Barbie, Rugrats, Dr. Seuss, Pooh) and b) horrifying/macho (Godzilla, Batman and Robin, Small Soldiers).

The only middle ground was Mickey Mouse, which didn't strike me as particularly girly OR boy-ey, but the background print on the Mickey Mouse bag looked suspiciously girly (sort of a dot print thing). I hate to be a sexist 1950s throwback kinda mom, but did I want Henry to be branded for life as the unsuspecting boy who trotted happily off to kindergarten for the first time, only to return home later that day shellshocked, embittered, and forever branded as the boy who liked girly lunchboxes?

I can still remember my first lunchbox: a lightweight metal box, not a bag. The box was patterned all over with a nondescript red plaid. It had a matching red plaid thermos inside, and enough room for a sandwich and an apple or cupcake (usually the former, rarely the latter). That was it. Nothing fancy about it, but it did the job. My friend Clem agrees, saying that his was metal, too, but more like a small toolbox -- "shaped like a little barn," he wrote. Sure! I remember those.

So what lunchbox to buy? What to do, what to do? I can picture Henry now, the downward trajectory of his life assured, all from the original sin of having given him a Mickey Mouse lunchbox. See young Henry, loitering (loitering!) on the street corner, clumsily rolled cigarette pinched between index finger and thumb, eyes squinting against the smoke, a half-empty beer at his feet. "Yeah," he says bitterly, "Everything woulda been OK if my mom'd only bought me a decent lunchbox. Now look at me -- traumatized, jobless, depressed, alcoholic, chain-smoking, and unable to sustain a healthy, long-term relationship with a woman. Oh, yeah, and smelly. Yeah, a decent lunchbox mighta set me on the right track, but no! She hadda have Mickey Mouse, with a girly dot-print kinda thing going on in the background."

Thank God for the Wal-Mart lady who was restocking one of the shelves after I'd been staring helplessly at my choices for a good ten minutes. Bless her! She happened to have plain, non-movie-character lunchboxes, in plain regular colors like blue, purple, and red, with no weird background prints and a short strap (so it doesn't look like a purse, God forbid). I snatched one of those up and beat it for the register but quick. Henry's future sanity and popularity are saved! Hurrah! (Is the rest of his childhood going to be this difficult?)

Post Office Box 835
East Liverpool, Ohio 43920 USA
E-MAIL: WordBanquet@gmail.com
Thank you for visiting www.WordBanquet.com!