Monday, April 6, 2009

E.T. Lunchbox











This is a picture of the lunchbox I used to carry to school in the sixth grade, when I went to St. __'s School. My parents got it for me the summer before school started, just after I had seen the movie for the first time at the drive-in. This was 1982 and I was 11 years old. My sister, who was a grade behind me in school, got the Pac-Man lunchbox at the same time, which I pretended to envy, but I knew mine was better.

I loved E.T. and was so thrilled to have this lunchbox. Little did I know that since I was in sixth grade, it was now officially uncool to have a lunchbox at school. I was only one of three nerds who still carried one. All the cool kids were now brown bagging it. I had crossed the invisible line from childhood to preteen. In fact I did not even realize this until my mom came home from conferences midway through the year, with the news that another parent had told her "Lunchboxes are uncool now." That is how uncool I was, that I had to be told by my mother that lunchboxes were uncool. (Of course I was also one of only two sixth graders who was not yet wearing a training bra, a fact realized by the entire female half of the class during scoliosis check in the principal's office, and I also was forced to wear, for the better part of that year, glasses that were literally held together by black electrical tape, but we'll leave that for another time).

I was really embarrassed about the social gaffe I had committed, and the lunchbox took on a sort of taint after that. I no longer wanted to carry it. And yet, I felt a loyalty to E.T. and all the true passion I had felt for him, how I had cried when I thought he was dead on that riverbank. In my heart I knew that the lunchbox was cool, no matter what the other kids thought. And so, as I kept bringing it to school every day for the rest of that whole social nightmare of a year, the E.T. lunchbox came to symbolize my own brand of iconoclasm. Despite the fact that I now loathe Spielberg's sentimental Hollywood schmaltz, I still love the lunchbox and keep it safely in my brother's basement amongst all my treasures of childhood.

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