Here’s a note from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, poster boy for the campaign against social promotion in our public schools.
Hey Mr. C.,
Well, the re-start of school is coming up in a couple of weeks, though for some of us it feels like school never ends. I’ve been a sophomore so long I don’t even have to think about what I need to have to go back. My folks bought everything in bulk about five years ago. I have a pallet of notebooks, a barrel of pencils and about a half ton of computer paper so I can print out all my assignments. My dad wondered if we could buy sheets with “F” and “incomplete” already scrawled across the top just to save the teacher some time. Ha ha.
I know 10th grade better than most of the teachers, and I can tell you for sure that it hasn’t changed all that much. Except this one thing, and it’s really bugging me. The food is different. Every time I go back there are more fresh fruits and vegetables and fewer meals covered in melted cheese. It’s getting so I don’t even recognize the smell of the cafeteria anymore! They talk about making healthy choices and eating locally grown food and getting lots of exercise and the whole thing gives me this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because I’m afraid I won’t get to eat wiener winks for lunch ever again!
One cool thing about summer – with my folks at work all day I can pig out on donuts, pop and ice cream sandwiches. Going back to school is going to be a kind of dietary cold turkey and I don’t know if I’m up to it. I might go into some kind of low calorie shock if all I can have for lunch is a rice cake and some raw carrots.
You have a lot of connections, right? I’m wondering if you can get word to the people who make those potato chips in a can and see if they can create some that lay perfectly flat – flat enough so that a single chip could hide between the pages of a book. I know those snacks are squeezed out of a machine anyway. It shouldn’t be more complicated than just twisting a dial somewhere to get the wave out of those round goodies. I figure a 320 page book has space for 321 Stealthy Chips, which ought to be more than enough to get me through the morning most days.
And if they like that idea, maybe a whole line of Stealthy Snacks would be a big money maker, like cheddar puffs that look like acne. You can stick them to your face first thing in the morning and leave them there until you’re feeling a little hungry. When the teacher isn’t looking, grab that pockmark off your forehead and pop it in your mouth! We could call them Cheese – Zits!
I have plenty of great ideas for sneaking bad food into the health crazed prisons that our school cafeterias are turning into, but I need somebody on the “outside” to make the connection to the multinationals for me.
Whaddaya say? I’ll share some of my Gummi Pens with you!
I told Bubby there’s no chance of a deal. I’m actually in favor of the healthy food push that’s going on in school cafeterias, and if he doesn’t like the new menu choices he should finally apply himself to his studies and try to graduate so he can choose to dine on French fries all day as a free, unhealthy adult. Now that I think of it, maybe he failed all these years just so he could keep eating turkey gravy over toast every other Wednesday. This might be just the thing to get him to turn his work in on time!
What was your favorite school lunch?
Trail Baboon 
Rise and Shine Babooners:
Just popped my head outside to test the weather. AAAHHH. Cool.
Wow, Bubby. Maybe if your improved your diet you would achieve more in school and find a clue to life beyond age 15! “Stealthy Snacks” have been around a long time–that’s why M and M’s and Skittles were invented (can easily be secreted in a pencil case). You would actually need to own a book and carry it with you to make them work. Are you up for that?
At this point in my life, school lunch was a LONG time ago. It was pre-pizza, pre-salad bar, pre-pop on site. The recent all-school reunion was my class’s 39th! I wondered who all those old people were. Our school lunches did not have a positive reputation in any way. I dimly recall that fried chicken was my favorite, but even that included fake mashed potatoes under the gravy. My mother was a teacher in the district. At one point when the district switched to a different type of tray, she brought a stack of the old ones home to set her garden plants on when she started them from seeds. I found some of them in the garage when I was cleaning and packing up her house for sale 2 years ago. I felt no nostalgia at all for those lunches.
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You guys already know I’m older than Jesus, and this discussion will dramatize that fact. I’ve never had a school lunch. When I was a kid, I walked seven blocks to school. At noon I would walk back home, have lunch with my parents and sister, then go back to school. Dad always drove home from his factory job to share lunch with us. I can’t remember a lunch we ever had without the whole family being there.
School lunch in my school was mostly for the farm kids who were bused in from areas around town (Ames, Iowa). I don’t have any idea of what the food was like. There were dark rumors about “mystery meat.” If some kid had a dog missing, the other ones would talk endlessly about how doggy the mystery meat sandwiches tasted that day.
My mom wasn’t Julia Child. A typical lunch might have been bean soup with crackers. Or hot dogs on white buns served with a fruit Jello and a handful of potato chips. Desert was two Oreo cookies.
Kids today are heavier than in my day. One reason is that they are driven to school, getting no exercise, whereas I walked 140 blocks every week of my school life, going back and forth to school.
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and on a weiner on white bun you ended up minus 150 calories by the time you arrived back at school
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No kidding. As an omnivore I find myself having a meal every 4-5 hours (with snacks in between) while awake — otherwise massive crankitude shows up. Trying to be vegetarian halved that time, as well as my productivity.
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Steve, in grade school i walked home for lunch like that, but only 3 blocks…
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i used to love the pizza burgers. i only did a couple years of school lunch. i went to catholic school until 7th frade and i remember fritos being a big deal at nativity. then on to junior high school where lunch was an adventure, great food, social life and fun. then i became a vegetarian in 10th grade and the lunches became a challange to see if i could find a way to mix and match lunch parts with others to score enough to fill the void. i remember peanut butter sandwich day was my big score opportunity. everyone knew i loved the peanut butter sandwiches and i’ll bet i scored 30 half sandwiches every time we had them for lunch. the peanut butter did have that sitting on a shelf for a year or two beyond the expiration date kind of aftertaste but i loved it just the same.
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dale the weenie winks recipe brought a thought, the mini donut, french fry guy at the state fair went to jail as noted in the papers earlier this year. maybe its time to open dale’s weenie winks. they have to be worth at least as much as the cheese on a stick or maybe you could buy the excess french fry buckets and sell weenie winks by the bucket.
i’ll bet you could make enough money in 10 day at the fair to survive nicely for th rest of the year.
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What? The French Fry guy in jail? I hadn’t heard that. I can only guess there’s a huge amount of jailhouse cred that comes with being a French Fry king.
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serious drug habbit, tax evasion etc.
sad story. but i’ll bet the other inmates would love to have him doing kp on hamburger night.
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George Wozniak th eHobbit Travel wizard co-owns the french places with his brither. He declared bankruptcy and they almost lost their place at the Fair due to money owed. Luckily for those of us who count on Fair Fries to fend off starvation. Debts were paid and the fries will be waiting for us. I don’t think jail was involved.
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Good Morning to All,
I think there has been some effort to improve the food in our local schools, but it didn’t seem much better when I checked it out when I was substitute teaching. I prefered to bring my lunch, but did eat the school food from time to time. Creamed turkey is one meal that is occaisionally available and is a favorite of many people who eat the school food and I also think it is fairly good. At the high school they have several different kinds of food available every day, but usually nothing I would consider to be really good. St Olaf college has an amazing food service with many healthy and very good tasting choices which I have had the pleasure of trying when the Sustainable Farming Assoc. held it’s annual meeting there.
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my kid did a swimming camp at st olaf and the food was great
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My son did a chorale festival at St Olaf last summer and I have to agree about their dining hall. At age ten, the dining hall is a powerful recruiting tool.
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Sloppy joes were my favorite.
A couple of times a year when I’m an election judge, we work in a school cafeteria, and in the evening people some in from Loaves & Fishes to serve a dinner there. The cooks always make up trays for all the election judges, and sometimes they make sloppy joes. Around five o’clock, when you’ve been there eleven hours without a real meal, the polling place fills with that barbeque aroma, and it smells just heavenly. The meals are served on the traditional school lunch trays with a vegetable – usually corn, I think – and some fruit and a fresh baked cookie.
I never make sloppy joes at home, so it’s a very rare treat. I could probably make a good ground turkey variant, on some kind of healthy whole wheat bun. But it wouldn’t be the same.
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my dad used to call them untidy josephs when we were kids
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My dad never swore, but during his time in the Army he picked up a whole set of vulgar names for food. When he saw what my mother had cooked that day for lunch he’d sing out its earthy, naughty Army name. Oyster stew was “boogers in cream.” Chipped beef on toast was “sh$t on shingles.” Untidy Josephs sounds so refined, relatively.
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Bonjour, Baboons! We made it back from Quebec last night. The trip was great and I have lots to tell about the Tempest and Christopher Plummer, Suzuki Institute, Montreal, southwest Ontario, and the hideous all-night traffic through Toronto. My favorite school lunch was chili and homemade buns with cherry crisp for desert. I didn’t like “the whistle” which was blown if we were too noisy, and which meant we had to eat in perfect silence.
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welcome back renee, i was driving through no dak last week and thought of you. forgot that you were suzukiing it up with the quebecers. glad to hear it was good. i love toronto but you have to stop. being frustrated by driving through can make you hate lots of cities. looking forward to the tempest and christopher plumber stories. is your daughter getting the hang of her fiddle?
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The meal that is most memorable from my elementary days was cheese pizza. It was reheated in individual aluminum serving trays – one rectangle per serving (maybe 3″x4″). I almost always brought lunch from home, but cheese pizza day was usually too good to miss. The gluey consistency of the cheese added to the charm. You could feel it doing the work to destroy your body as you consumed it…As an added bonus, it was guaranteed to burn the roof of your mouth, which was easily taken care of by milk served in little cartons (some years they had jokes on the sides of the cartons).
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wow id forgotten about the burnthe roof of your mouth pizza. great memory.
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lunch lady booth at the fair dale. put together a weekly menu. it would fly.
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Anything like Minnesota Church Basement Restaurants of New York? Personal favorite on Prairie Home.
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heck i’ll bet lunch lady restraunt on grand avenue or downtown would work too.
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by the way dale cheese zits will go down in the annals of baboon history.
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Mental imagery of Cheese – Zits is making me glad I didn’t bring any cheese for lunch today.
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Are you eatring any raisins?
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Nope, just Skor balls. I can forgive Skor balls anything though.
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Skor balls I think made my very obscure joke funnier, for me at least.
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Poo jokes are hardly obscure!
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I usually liked school food. My absolute favorite was Turkey Sticks and Baked Potato day. Turkey sticks are like fish sticks, but made from turkey. Yum! The baked potatoes would come with the squirt cheese, which you could dip your turkey sticks into as well. They got rid of turkey sticks while I was in high school though 😦 I also liked Taco Salad day. The taco salads were really good and they came with a gooey cinnamon roll…mmm. I’m making myself hungry. On the days that I didn’t like the hot lunch, I could get a salad at the salad bar, adding as many vegetables as I wanted 🙂 I do miss that. My salads were more veggies than lettuce, haha.
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The Tempest was wonderful. We had seats in the second row and could see everything well. The stage was surrounded by seating on three sides. The costuming was elaborate and Elizabethan except Miranda, Prospero, and Calliban, who were in rags and Ariel, who was in a pale blue unitard. There was no scenery to speak of, and lots of special effects. Ariel flew all over the place, and Prospero levitated at times. People also emerged from below stage and the stage revolved and part of it tilted like a see-saw depending on what was going on. The theatre was filled with mist the whole time. We were treated to a real tempest when we left the theatre and there was a noisy, rainy thunderstorm going on. The whole experience was great fun.
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Wow – sounds fabulous!
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It was! I tried to remember technical and costume details for you who are really into those things. The acting was fantastic.
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I started bringing lunch from home when I got to Junior High and we had 15 minutes to get from class, get lunch, eat lunch and back to class. Prior to that, the two things I remember loving were the cornbread with honey butter (should try to recreate that-how hard could it be?) and the square of plain red jello with a star of whipped cream on top.
The son and heir also brings his lunch from home for the same reason of time constraint. He now packs his own, which means he pretty much takes the same stuff every day. Once a month he gets school lunch, always chooses the same thing-chicken patty sandwich.
Interesting thing at his school, they now have something called the “sharing table” where if you end up with something on your tray you aren’t going to eat and it can be left there neatly, you can leave it for somebody else to grab. Seems to work out well.
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A ‘Sharing Table’… hm. That sounds cool. Presumable everything is still wrapped?
Here in the scene shop I put snacks out for the college kids, but I only do ‘wrapped’ things; no boxes of pretzels or anything they’re all sticking their grubby hands into… and I tease them I won’t do anything chocolate because that only lasts two minutes. So I only put out snacks that nobody likes because it lasts longer that way… I swear some of the kids are living off my shop snacks…
Whatever Fleet Farm has on sale will be the snack this month!
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School lunches for me consisted of meals bought at the school canteen — mainly rice (white, fried, congee-d) with accompanying sides all sorts (stir-fried, stewed, boiled meats and vegetables) and noodles.
The soupy noodles stall had a specific dish for every day of the week — a schedule which they are still adhering to 12 years later — in addition to the regular everyday options of curry noodles or clear broth noodles. Desserts/prepped fruit (no durian though)/jellies (made with agar-agar i.e. seaweed gelatin) and drinks were available at a different stall.
In the mornings the canteen had breads and steamed buns, but I never got there early enough for breakfast.
We considered ourselves very lucky to have all these options 🙂
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That sounds pretty great. St Paul has started adding a fair amount of new foods to reflect the compostition of the student body. A lot of the menus look pretty good.
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Morning–
When I was in elementary school you had to buy lunch for the whole week. And since I don’t like fish, and there was always fish one day of the week, I took cold lunch through school. Bologna (had to sing the song to get the spelling) and ketchup sandwiches or ‘Sandwich Spread’. Remember ‘Sandwich spread’? Saw it in the store a couple weeks and was flooded with memories; I didn’t realize they still made it… I think the ham and olive loaf too on occasion… white Wonder bread of course.
Then middle school / high school they started to offer more menu items. Yes to the pizza and also there was a sausage and cheese sandwich that I like.
For my kids now, we use an online service to put money in their lunch accounts and they type in their PIN number to get lunch. Last year, someone copied or stole my son’s number and suddenly he was having $12 lunches…
My daughter is on a Gluten free diet and the lunch room ladies are always extra careful to those kids; a separate lunch line and my daughter loves their food…
Have a good one!
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well, my Mom was a school lunch lady for 30-some years. we had our first “school lunch” in 5th grade, i think. everything was from scratch (except the commodities) so it didn’t impress us because it was like eating at home. we did like the hotdogs because the wieners came from the home-town butcher shop and the buns were freshly baked by the town baker. in high school i had to work in the lunch room every noon. (no running over to Burk’s bar for a burger) my pay was a “free” lunch (which i have just now figured out really was pay to my parents!). i almost never ate anything. one hot dog day my friend Wee Zee ate six hotdogs (she worked in the kitchen too, so they were free). she never ate another hot dog again.
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I never ate a hot lunch I am pretty sure until about grade 7 or 8 and them maybe once or twice a year, a money thing, but that was fine with me. Sandwiches on homemade bread, pb&j or silta or cold roast beef. I doubt my mother would have bought lunch meat then. She did buy blocks of cheese at some warehouse in Duluth, which were there in the ice box for weeks, consdiering how rare were trips to Duluth. Also cookies or cake or bars. No fruit I am sure; later years home-canned fruit when you could get little containers to hold it. (Steve and I grw up in an era when there were still shortages from the war; I remember what people did to keep tires going.) Our own milk in a thermos in a plain cube lunch box which lasted a few years, except for the thermos, which I would get in trouble for breaking. In first grade we ate in the gym/lunch room/art room/assembly room. They brought hot lunch from the HS. I remember the aluminum cylinders in which they brought the hot food. When I hear the world alumimum, I often picture them. Next school had a real lunch room with a kitchen, but they still brought food from the HS. From grade 5 on I had tuna fish sandwiches almost every day, in part to avoid some of the other things my mother would use and also to add some moisture to my mother’s bread which had a knack for drying out. But I still love tuna, only thing I have as sub. More kids carried lunch than bought it in my grade school years. There was not a lot of loose money for most people. I think it was about evenly divided in HS.
Today my grandkids ride a bus 6 miles to the HS, eat breakfast, and then ride 8 miles to their school. All quite nice. Now this year their father will drive the bus part of that time.
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A bit of whinning; well a lot actually, but you might find this interesting. If you do not want to hear aobut my fibromyalgia, just ignore this.
This is why I have not posted as much as usual: My life the last few days has been what I can only call “raw.” The last few nights, as usual I get as tired as I can and then take my mild sleep pill and a dose of pain killer and then wait for it to to get heavy enough to make me sleep , around 12 to 1 a.m.. Most nights I sleep until 5:30 to 6:30. But the last few nights I wake up around 2 or 3 in full autonomic response (fight or flight state). For two hours or so I am groggy and wired at the same time, dozing off and then jumping awake in fight or flight again. Then I sleep for an hour or two and wake up in flight or flight, which mostly disapates on my bike ride. Then as I sit here at work I meld back into fight or flight, so I am so wired I can barely function. It took me an hour to type my above post, my fingers are so hard to control and my brain is so fuzzy. And still this will be full of errors. (Fortunately I have nothing to do at work, absolute zero business right now.) I have been through this before; it goes away.
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Awww, gee, Clyde. No fair . . . you feeling that punk. I’ve noticed your lack of posting and hoped it was something else. I’ll try to take heart from the fact “it goes away.”
Good luck. I hope you feel better soon.
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sharing, not whining, Clyde. i’m so sorry that you have to go through this. does the FM cause the fight/flight thing? or what?
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Yes, FM is a disfunction of the central nervous system, the brain stem and spinal cord, essentially a failure of the autonomic system as near as anyone can tell. A bunch of nerotransmiters sending faulty messages such as pain and fight or flight or triggering the digestive system incorrectly, or other things. Then it all gets in a cycle getting worse where a normal body would shut it down.
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I’ve also been concerned by your absence. Is there a known duration or is it completely random? I’m hoping it is a known and short duration event.
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Comes and goes at its own will; but it probably at its core is a stress disorder. I have flair-ups frequently without saying anything to anyone. But it gets much worse at at times, perhaps from stress and certainly from seasonal change. My body has declared fall is here. So it will be far more common for the next few weeks.
Traveling to San Diego will be interesting next month for what it does to me and my wife. It is amazing how accomodating the airline is for her. A simple email to them, and they have arranged transport of her walker and moving around in three airports.
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There is an article in the NYTimes today about a retrovirus that causes chronic fatigue syndrome. It also mentions all the medical skepticism about the diagnosis. Next to that article, which I popped up and read, are all kinds of ads for products to treat Fibromyalgia. I believe they are different processes, but I also know that “experts” differ about the process and etiology. Interesting read. Discusses the sleep problems, neuro issues, etc. that are similar to FM.
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CFS and FM are clearly related. Most experts think they are parts of the same syndrome. Regularly someone announces they have found the cause of both, and then they do not prove to be true. But the best guesses seem to be, as in all syndromes, multiple causes. Virtually everyone with FM has had CFS or Epstein-Barr or whatever you want to call it, if it is one thing, and probably myofascial pain too, which maybe the same thing or they are two things. Everyone with FM has or had depression but not everyone with depression gets FM. There are about 35 things which are generally true of people with FM, but none of them are true of all people with FM, or even more than usually about 75-80%: to name one odd thing–ridges on the fingernails. About 70-90% of people with FM are women.
You will never ever, I do not think, find anything on the Internet not surrounded by ads for products addressed to FM. The one FM publication always surrounds articles with ads for mostly doubtful products to address the specific topic of that article.
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All I know about fibromyalgia outside of a medical textbook is — the doctor is not the sufferer. Hope you feel better soon, Clyde.
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At our school the favorite was green bean hamburger casserole. No one Really liked that and we would scrape it onto each others trays because if we had a clean plate we could go back for seconds of the sides – a cinammon roll and shoe string potatoes.
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In 1st and 2nd grade I went to school on a Marine base. We had leftover chow. There was a prize if you finished every day for a week and nobody won!
In jr and sr high I went to a fancy private school where lunch was part of the tuition. I didn’t dare tell my parents how unhealthy the lunches were. I remember that every friday for a year we had pizza and french fries
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When I did curriculum for Lake Superior school district, at one of our schools, one of the many now closed, the teachers in their classrooms would teach kids how to hide food they did not eat because the cooks would try to make them eat everything. Then the teacher who had luncroom duty each day would distract the cooks so they could not see the kids doing it.
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I should have said hide the food in their milk cartons.
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In elementary school, if you tried that with your spinach, you would have to eat it out of the milk carton.
How many calls would the school get today with tactics like that.
I never knew until I was an adult that spinach was anything other than salty pond scum.
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Greetings! As a good Catholic family, we were guilted into cleaning our plates every meal and pickiness was NOT tolerated — all those “starving kids in China” as my mother admonished. God bless her, she was a wonderful mother in many ways, but a bad cook. So, like my Depression-era father, I learned to eat anything and everything and like it. School lunches were pretty tasty fare compared to Mom’s cooking. No real favorites, ’cause I liked everything and ate huge amounts of food for a skinny kid.
I remember bringing my empty tray up to the area to scrape dishes and put into tubs for washing — and being mortified at kids throwing away entire helpings of food. Those big gray, Brute barrels just full of food. It was just shocking to me that they would throw away good stuff. In my mind, I would try to think of ways to save the food for my family or to feed other hungry people.
In the Catholic private school I went to, once girls were in 5th or 6th grade, they could help out in cafeteria for free meals, which I gladly did. It sure beat Mom’s baloney, cheese or olive loaf sandwiches with a slightly scarred apple from garden. Nobody trades you for that kind of stuff.
In high school, it was different. That progressive, hippie boarding school had pretty good eats overall — mostly homemade. The campus was an old Salvatorian Seminary, so the old brothers still lived there and helped out. We didn’t always know their names, so we named them according to what they did. Brother Bread baked awesome bread everyday for the meals. Some ladies from the town worked in kitchen. Brother Flowers tended the landscaping and lawns. Brother Bus drove the buses to games and to pick up kids from the Milwaukee area, and so on.
If the roast was particularly tough one day, the students would jokingly wonder if one of the older brothers was missing. But overall, the food was pretty decent. Because we lived there 5 days a week, they were cooking 3 meals a day. On weekends, they still had to cook for the brothers and the faculty and their families that lived on the campus. It was a very cozy and character-forming experience.
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Great tale.
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In 8th grade, the English teacher Mr. Stout, would make notes when the lunch menu was read over the loud speaker. We would then discuss the merits and hypothesize about things like if ketchup counted for one if the basic food groups that day.
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In high school (mid 60s) we got something called Pizza Casserole which was our favorite, and they never had enough for seconds. It was kind of like lasagna but had fennel seeds and no tomato — my mom knew someone who got her the recipe, and I still have it — here is:
Marshalltown High School’s Pizza Casserole
(10 servings)
1-1/3 # ground beef (or part ground pork)
1/2 tsp. fennel seeds
1-1/4 tsp. salt (I’ll bet half of that would do!)
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/8 tsp. ground allspice
1/2 # broad noodles
6-1/2 oz. shredded American cheese
3-1/4 c. spaghetti sauce
oregano
———————–
Braise meat well with seasonings.
Cook noodles until tender; drain.
Layer all ingredients starting with noodles, ending with cheese.
Sprinke with oregano.
Bake uncovered 30-45 minutes (that’s quite a spread, and I don’t remember what worked best) at 350 degrees.
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I’m thinking until cheese is browned and bubbly.
Seems like everything is already cooked, the baking just serves to casserolize it.
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Fined! You are fined for violence against the English language!
Casserolize? Heavens!
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Steve! How is that any worse than ‘MN in Sudbury’s’ use of “crankitude” earlier today?? Both, by the way, words that I find extremely enjoyable! Hah! 😉
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I read the recipe title waaaay too fast and processed it as “Marshmallow Pizza Casserole”.
As for violence against the English language, one that makes me grit my teeth at work is: “Has the patient been consented?”
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Right you are, MN in Sudbury. Your example (“consented”) and “casserolized” have in common the fact they turn a noun into a verb and then, as if that weren’t enough, make the verb transitive. That really boosts my level of crankitude.
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Babooners????
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This is a story of milk break, not lunch. I grew up in the town where Blue Bunny milk was bottled. At morning milk break, a tradition that started with FDR’s campaign to improve the nutrition and hygiene of rural children, a chosen student (meaning someone with good behavior) would go to the milk refrigerator in the lunch room for our class’s milk crate. This was in the days of mean teachers, so any chance to foray out of the classroom was a chance to look into other classrooms and say hello to the school secretary. Said student would tote 25 clinking Blue Bunny milk bottles to the classroom then distribute them. We had to peel off the aluminum top and insert the straw, drink it down, then replace the empty glass jar in the metal crate. The chosen well-behaved student had a second freedom walk down the hall with the empties, which were placed next to the milk refrigerator. It was a big deal to get that freedom walk.
By the 5th grade those glass jars had been replaced with cardboard cartons. The milk in the jars tasted better than milk from the cardboard. Sigh. However, several years ago, on a trip back to see the High School pals, I found a set of those jars for sale in the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Museum and Gift shop. They now set proudly on my kitchen counter, holding pencils. I don’t drink milk anymore–lactose intolerant.
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our milk was “Oak Grove” and the little cartons were waxed so that, after we were through drinking the milk, we could chew off the wax.
Bobbette “couldn’t” drink plain milk, so she got special permission to bring a “Flavor Straw” (remember those??) – chocolate or strawberry.
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Yes! Thanks for a couple of great memories, Jacque and Barb.
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I’ve got a hunch you were “someone with good behavior” Jacque. Right?
And my nose twitches at that phrase, “mean teachers.” I sure hope they are no longer part of our educational systems. Would “mean teachers” be a productive Trail Baboon topic? I have a lot to say!
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I have seen any number of wonderful Suzuki string teachers and they are never mean and are kind and demanding and sensitive to the individual child.
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I’m so old we had government surplus commodities…creamy peanut butter, gobs of butter and honey on squishy white bread…making my mouth water even as I write…oh, and lots of really cold whole milk.
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