Some of my earliest memories can be traced back to the days that my sister and I attended Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Spokane, Washington, as did my mom and her sister a generation before. Now I'm not one to claim that we trudged through rain, ice, and snowy blizzards, five miles each way, but we did have the good fortune to have grown up in a time when kids still walked to school.
It gave us the opportunity to experience all four seasons up close and personal. We collected chestnuts and ran through piles of leaves in the fall, and caught snowflakes on our tongues as wintertime began. Springtime brought rain, and with it a parade of umbrellas making their way down the street. And on those hot afternoons just before the end of the school year, we were more than happy to let sprinklers soak us as we cut across neighbor's lawns along our way.
Pixie cuts and pony tails. Monkey bars and tether ball. Easy Bake Ovens. Saddle shoes and plaid jumpers worn by little girls with scraped knees. A good many things come to mind. I don't recall giving much thought as to the wearing of dresses to school, and was completely oblivious to the fact that our saddle shoes would eventually give way to platform shoes, or that by the time I got to college, disco would be all the rage. Over the course of my growing up, there were considerable changes in the world. The particulars, when such a surplus of information is involved can become a bit blurred over time.
Those born between the years of 1946 and 1964 are known as "Baby Boomers", so technically that is where I fall in the scope of things. But while the Baby Boomers were protesting the Vietnam war and becoming part of history at Woodstock, I was still a kid in grade school, happily playing hopscotch without a care in the world. So where does that put kids in my age group? While groundbreaking movies such as "The Graduate" and "Look Who's Coming to Dinner" where tackling difficult social issues, my friends and I were busy watching "Gilligan's Island" and "I Dream of Jeannie". Our biggest concerns centered around wondering if the castaways would ever be rescued, or simply wishing that we could blink wishes like Jeannie did. When the daily newspaper was delivered, we'd skip over the news of the day, preferring the comic section and to take a peek at the upcoming weekly school lunch menu.
The school lunch hour was just that. It was lunch and it lasted an hour. Mealtime, whether with friends or family wasn't for the mere purpose of consuming food, but more of an event. The school lunch hour left us plenty of time for eating, socializing, and recess to boot. The anticipation of the noon meal would begin mid-morning as the aroma of bread baking began wafting down the hallways. As noon approached, we waited for the sound of the lunch bell . . . and we were off.
A line formed as we made our way into the lunch room. The line seemed long, but moved along briskly as we chattered away. Moving along in line, we'd get a bottle of milk, and alongside the milk crate was a dispenser filled with little paper straws. One tap, one straw. The notion of plastic straws, or of plastic milk containers was literally unheard of, and that went for plates and utensils as well.
There was no debate as to paper or plastic, nor of whole milk or skim. No controversy regarding the fat content of our meals, or theories of how lunchtime could be shortened or run in rotating schedules. The food pyramid hadn't been thought up yet, and has since been tossed out. We did however, have fish every Friday. Some things were a given, and culturally understood.
Lunch was prepared every morning in the school kitchen. We could go back for seconds, but only after we had finished everything on our plate. After lunch, plates and silverware went back to the kitchen, we placed our empty milk bottles back in the crate, and put our paper straws in the trash bin. The remainder of the hour was ours to go outside and play.
The recent dialogue regarding the use of plastic straws gives one pause, and an opportunity to recall an earlier time of paper straws and glass milk bottles. One politician is promising to outlaw plastic straws, but admitted that she doesn't have any details as to what would actually replace them. She laughed and essentially blew off paper straws, suggesting that we'd need to rely on innovation to perfect any paper straw alternative. What? Did she really say that? Now it was getting personal. I'm sure that I got that look on my face, you know . . . the one that your dog gives you when he knows that something just seems a bit off. Am I missing something? For starters, paper straws are not "new", and they most certainly need no innovation. Let's not overthink this, it isn't rocket science.
The objective of a straw seems simple enough . . . to get one's beverage to the mouth. Paper straws do that, problem solved. Now we can move on to far more pressing issues in the world. Is it possible that many of these "new" problems aren't really new at all, and that solutions might be simpler than we try to make them? Perhaps a few old school ideas could be the answer to some of these new age questions.
Got Milk?
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