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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