2005-01-05 - 10:38 p.m.
All the things I COULD write about, the Christmas holiday, New Years, the tsunami, I'm overwhelmed, so instead I'll write about something silly. But not too silly.
On the way back home down I-5 after a great Christmas break at my parents' house in Northern California, I stopped at the Apricot Tree Restaurant for lunch. They happen to have, of all unusual things, situated overhead an immense lunch box collection all along the network of beams below their ceiling--hundreds and hundreds of lunch boxes (and matching Thermoses when they could find them...I've capitalized that word, because I believe it is not a generic term but a trade name of the Aladdin company, a word like Jeep, Kleenex, or Xerox). And they're grouped by type and labelled as such--categories like "Disney," "Westerns," "Super Heroes," "Classic TV Shows," and so on.
Well, seeing those lunch boxes really brought back fond memories. When I was a kid at Walter Hays Elementary School in Palo Alto, we'd bring our lunches from home (that particular school didn't have a cafeteria) and every year along with all my new back-to-school clothes, I'd get a new lunch box, too. I remember I had "Hopalong Cassidy" (that was the first TV show I ever watched, which predated even "The Howdy Doody Show" or "The Mickey Mouse Club," or "Ding Dong School," which are three other shows I loved when I was a kid--remember, I am old enough to remember when television FIRST started!), and then I had "Superman", and then another year I had a lunch box that was "Plaid," and then the "oldest" one was a black domed "construction worker's" type.
Thinking back to TV then, I also remember the Andy Divine Show, with whiny, masochistic Andy Devine who was always getting mercilessly tortured by sadistic "Froggy", who'd trick him into getting ice cold buckets of water poured all over him, or messy pies in his face or sticky honey in his pocket or glue in his mouth. "Howdy Doody" had Claribel the Clown who couldn't talk, but communicated "Yes" or "No" with squeezes on a bicycle horn. But still my favorite was "Hopalong Cassidy," because it featured a futuristic civilization that was located underground beneath the prairie. The people who lived in that underground city wore silver-colored clothing and masks and capes and for some reason I lusted after the idea of wearing a cape. I guess capes enhanced my feeling of stature and of the dramatic. I would have killed to be able to wear a cape. Actually, I wouldn't mind wearing a cape, even now.
It was because of capes that I liked Superman (and he could fly, which, of course, was a huge plus), and I even got to play Superman in one of our school plays. I rescued Louise Shimmel, who played a princess in distress, and backstage prior to going on, we kissed (I was the make-out king of 5th grade--girls competed for the honor of getting kissed by me in the cloak room). She was the first girl I ever kissed who had on lipstick (because of the makeup for the play, she was otherwise too young), which was a frosty pink and I suddenly felt very grown up and manly and, well, a Superman!
Just that previous summer, I had been away at a summer camp near Santa Cruz (in Felton, to be exact), "Captain Ed's Boyland" was what the camp was called, and my parents sent me there for two contiguous sessions. At the camp they had an old swimming hole that was about a fifteen minute walk through the woods and with me in my bathing suit, I'd tie my long and wide beach towel around my neck like a cape and run the whole way down the dusty path to the swimming hole, bent over and arms outspread, I was, for sure, Superman flying (and I thought I really was!). When I got to the cliff edge where the swimming hole was down below, I wouldn't stop running but would simply leap forward in dive posture (after thoughtfully ripping off my towel-cape first so it wouldn't accompany me into the water) and fly out through space and down into the icy cold water of the swimming hole. I see kids like that at the school today and feel a certain kinship toward them and their unfettered wildness. I'm the only "authority" who never says "stop running, you have to walk." I love it that those kids don't even hesitate when they see me now like they did at first, momentarily stilled in expectation of the deflating command. They now all know I'll just smile or laugh as they and their mental adventure soar by across the schoolground.
Yes, I was a weird kid, completely able to live for hours in a world of my own devising and Walter Hays Elementary School, pupilled with the children of brilliant Stanford University professors and aerospace engineers (rocket scientists) like my father (Walter Hays is, even now, the second-highest-rated public elementary school in California, and the highest rated is nearby Cubberly) was the perfect school for imaginative children who could live for months and months in a group fantasy story of our own making or adaptation. We were Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew adventurers (because our group of boys also played with a group of girls who were willing to play with boys), or characters in the several dozen Oz books, or travelers to the Mushroom Planet or international boy/girl twins from the Lucy Fitch Perkins books.
School after Walter Hays was never quite as good as that one. When we moved to a much bigger house in Atherton when I was in the sixth grade (Atherton now has the first or second highest per capita income of any town in the United States--when we lived there, it was mostly CEOs of major San Francisco corporations or stockbrokers and business owners, but now it's all people like the founder of Netscape or Travelocity or other Silicon Valley dot-com success stories), the kids were all cliquish and there was no friendly group imagination or playing at all, just an ever-constant comparison of clothing brands or collections of material goods.
Christmas is good for making one want to be (or feel like) a kid again, and since I have gotten on this "lower your fat thermostat" eating and exercise program which is enhanced by bringing the right kind of food for lunch, I realized that I wanted to have, once again, a lunch box like I had when I was a kid at Walter Hays.
I didn't even know if they still even made things like that, or where I would find one. But once I got home, I got on-line and found the perfect on-line lunch box site and ordered for myself a beautiful red and blue Spiderman lunch box complete with matching Thermos! Spiderman, he's even better than Superman because he's just a sweet kid inside the costume, wrestling with the frustrating reality of his destiny. And oh boy do I LOVE his soaring through the skyscraper canyons of New York City, shooting out his elastic web-vines for support and rescuing errant citizens from danger as he goes.
So now for lunch every day at school I bring my Spiderman lunch box with a sandwich in a sandwich bag, soup in the Thermos, an apple, a napkin, and a spoon and I am as happy as any little boy can be! And I find I'm not the least bit tempted by left-over pizza or cookies that seem to be endemic in our school's employee kitchen. I can eat what I'm supposed to eat and feel thoroughly fulfilled emotionally and physically.
I thought at first that I'd have to explain this lunch box thing to everybody else, but no, not at all, people spot that Spiderman lunch box from yards away and they ALL get it! I have received complements and nostalic recitations from so many people and one teaching partner said, "I think you might start a trend!" Even the kids notice it--"Hey, that's a cool Spiderman lunch box!" I might even start a trend with the KIDS, who currently all bring their lunches in soft-sided insulated bags or back packs. That's pretty special, if you ask me, to start a trend among modern-day children consumers, but that's what one can do when they are genuine and do things out of love and a never-ending sense of wonder and hope-filled excitement.
Hummm...now I'm wanting to have a Lionel train set that chugs around the room just below the ceiliing of my apartment. I'll probably not go there, but it's wonderful to think that I certainly CAN if I really WANT. And that's what's great about being an ADULT.
Yes, I do believe in Santa Claus. And so should you. If you don't see him out "there" (seeing is believing), then feel him in "here" (believing is seeing). Santa Claus is everywhere, but right now, he's getting his "milk and cookies" from out of a Spiderman lunch box.
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