My lunchbox

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In the summer of 1963, just after I turned six years old, my family took me to the Payless Drug Store on Fourth Plain in Vancouver, Washington, and I was allowed to pick out a lunchbox.

I picked out the version pictured above. (I still remember how excited I was to pick out my own lunchbox, and how pleased I was with my decision.)

I was in love with it. It had spacemen! And rockets! And moonscapes! And the most vivid beautiful blue outer-space sky!

I still have it, intact, with the thermos and everything. When I open it, there’s a smell of stale sandwiches and Kool-Aid left over from the mid-1960s.

There’s also a small piece of white fabric tape on the side, with LOREN WILLIAMS written in my mother’s fancy cursive handwriting.

These lunchboxes are collector’s items now. We’re not talking a million dollars, but maybe a hundred or two. It’s on the shelf in my bedroom now, and I look at it every day, and I am so pleased that I still have it.

I made the mistake of bragging about it to Apollonia the other day, and showed her a picture of it. She looked at it dubiously. “What show is this supposed to be?” she said. “’Lost in Space’?”

“Nope,” I said happily. “Generic. No branding at all. Just spacemen from the future.”

“Dude,” she said. “That’s kind of lame.”

“You’re lame,” I said.

Let haters hate. I’m as happy with my generic-spaceman lunchbox as I was when I first set eyes on it in 1963.

Off to Mars!

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Vintage drinking glasses

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The TV series “Mad Men” has absorbed Partner and me for about a year now. We’re all caught up through Season Six. Each season has covered a year of the 1960s (more or less), so we’re up to the end of 1968. We’ve seen the assassination of two Kennedys, the murder of Martin Luther King, the Love Generation, et cetera.

The show's writing is excellent, as is the acting (by people like Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss and John Slattery and Robert Morse).

But, as with a lot of series set in the past, it’s possible to watch this show for the clothes and the sets and the accessories.

Bugles, for example. When I saw a minor character eating Bugles, I remembered when Bugles were new (in the mid-1960s), and I was amused and charmed, and astonished at the writers’ acumen at knowing that the product was introduced (with great fanfare) in the mid-1960s.

Also: in “Mad Men,” everyone drinks all the time. We see the drinking accessories: really darling glasses, clear glass with silver rims.

My parents had glasses just like them, with a big “W” monogram on them, in silver, naturally. I loved those glasses.

They recently showed up on a cutesy website: replicas of the “silver-rimmed Mad Men drinking glasses,” $25 for two (not including shipping).

Aha, I thinks, and went to eBay, and found two cute authentic Dorothy Thorpe roly-poly drinking glasses for $18 (including shipping).

They arrived the other day. They are perfect. They make me happy when I look at them, and they make a nice tinkling sound when I put ice cubes in them.

And they remind me of my childhood.

So, for your drink: will you have brown or clear?

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