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!
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