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!
