So What's This All About?

OK, full disclosure -- this isn't really a blog about lunch boxes. Nope. I don't collect old lunch boxes. I don't know anything about what they are worth on Ebay. I'm not really that into antiques and collectibles.

In truth, I was just tooling around through my brain, looking for a fun title -- something that would be memorable and resonate with people. I tried song titles, quotes from movies and books, and found nothing. I considered making it more descriptive about me ("Life on the Hill" or "Diary of a Chicken Famer") but was worried about boring everyone (including myself).

I dipped into childhood memories. I could try the nostalgia angle. "That'll get em in the door." How about "Pop rocks and coke". Damn, someone already took that name. Then it came to me....lunch boxes.

Those metal ones, with the thermoses inside, and pictures from TV shows. I remembered sitting in the cafeteria of the Sanbornton Central Elementary School, watching Garth Morin open up his shiny Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox. Watched him taking out the thermos, which I imagined was full of nice cold milk, or (even worse) maybe warm soup that his mom put in there. Oh, how I longed for a lunch box of my own, to match Garth's. Maybe a "Starsky and Hutch". I wasn't picky. I would have accepted a "Scooby-Doo" lunchbox, or a "Donny Osmond".

But I knew it would never be. I was a "hot lunch" kid. My mom worked, and had to get four kids out the door in the morning, so packing lunches wasn't in the cards. Even when we had a field trip and had to have a packed lunch, I got the plain brown sack. Peanut butter and jelly and an apple, maybe some Graham crackers. No hot soup in a "Battlestar Gallactica" thermos for me.

I'm not complaining. My childhood was great. Mom and dad loved us unconditionally, and we had all that we needed. But I still remember that feeling -- a mixture of envy and shame that I felt because I lacked that important token of coolness -- the lunch box. Just one more reason why I would never be one of the cool kids.

And that feeling of always wanting to fit in, but never quite getting to the inner circle, no matter how hard I tried, well it never went away.

Here I am, thirty years later, having experienced college, law school, professional life.. and those feelings of being an outsider, never hip enough -- they haven't gone away.

So, I guess this is as good a title as any.