My Time Machine

The things we hold onto in order to remember our youth!  I carried this lunch box to school for two years during high school, until I got my Lion King lunch box when I was a senior.  After I retired this as an actual lunch box, it held my cassette tapes in my car, until I finally got a car with a CD payer.

This started out as my dad’s lunch box when he worked for United Airlines.  My sisters and I had put a few little stickers on it for him, like one that said, “Dad Thinks I’m Cute.”  The original handle came off, so Dad used a discarded airplane cabinet handle in its place.  At some point, the latches seized to work correctly, so Dad took some kind of wire and made a sort of huge safety pin out of it to hold the latches shut.

When Dad no longer needed the lunch box, it became my project.  I put every sticker I could find on that thing, and now almost every sticker on this masterpiece has a story.

My sister used to joke that this lunch box would one day be on display at the Smithsonian.  It no longer serves any other purpose for me, but I cannot bear to part with it.  It sits atop a shelf in my closet, and I glance at it on almost a daily basis as a reminder of who I was, and it always makes me smile.  No other sixteen year old girl had a lunch box like mine!