Keeping Lunch Boxes Alive

This picture is from the first day of school in our new adopted family. I was in 3rd grade. The best thing about it was my lunch box. I got a metal Peanuts comic strip lunch box with a matching thermos. I read the comic strips on each side everyday while I ate my self-made peanut butter and jelly sandwich, apple, orange or banana and occasional bag of pretzels or potato chips. I filled my thermos with Kool-aid everyday.

Before we were adopted I'd never had a real lunch box. In the foster home, Dorothy made brown sack lunches and we bought a milk or we ate hot lunch. The glamour of the lunch box wore off pretty quick. Unlike brown sacks, I had to keep track of my lunch box. I had to remember to bring it home, clean it out and repack it myself. If I ignored it over the weekend or spring break, the thermos grew mold and the 1/2 eaten fruit went slimy in the bottom. Our adoptive mom Virginia refused to buy brown lunch sacks because we needed to learn responsibility. Brown paper sacks were for undisciplined, lazy children.

By the end of the school year, my beloved lunch box was dented, hanging on by one hinge and reeked of food smells that permeated the metal insides. Virginia inspected our boxes, hoping they were in good enough shape she wouldn't have to buy new ones for the following school year. She was sorely disappointed. At least I still had mine. Rex's lunch box disappeared early in the school year and Emelia's was looking pretty rough, too. With Matthew's precise, mechanical ways, his was the only lunch box worth saving. Virginia kept his box for reusing the next fall.

After a couple of years of buying lunch boxes, Virginia finally gave up on us and bought a case of brown lunch bags. If the ability to maintain a lunch box really is a measurement of future caretaking skills, I think we should acknowledge it is a minor miracle that my three children made it to adulthood in one piece. My lunch boxes didn't fair so well.