Oh, Sweet Elixir

For six years, I ate the same thing for lunch: one peanut butter and jam sandwich, a baggie of chips, and three Hydrox cookies. And for the price of a dime, a half-pint carton of milk. Packed in the requisite metal lunchbox. (Favourite? Charlie’s Angels.)

Note: not jelly, but jam.

There is a hierarchy where spreadable fruit is concerned. Far-and-away, it is preserves that best preserves the integrity of the fruit while managing to be spreadable as well. Next is jam. While not as fruitful as preserves, jam still retains a goodly portion of fruit. Jelly? Well, good as a last resort. Too jiggley and wiggly for my palate. Doesn’t spread well and barely resembles anything with any nutritional value.

Alas — my favourite flavour is grape…and grape is not available as a preserve.

Anyway, I ate my P and J sandwiches, and aformentioned accoutrement, each and every day (sans a field trip) simply because it never occurred to me to ask for anything different.

Different rules for field trip days. Lunch boxes weren’t permitted on field trips. Most likely because the teachers had enough trouble keeping track of their charges. To be responsibile for lunch boxes on top of that was asking too much. DadGiraffe had a supply of brown paper bags, kept on top of the refrigerator, for just such occasions.

Away from school grounds, buying milk was not an option. And though a tinfoil-encased can of soda was offered as a special treat on field trip days, the year one thousand, nine hundred, eighty-one saw the release of self-contained elixir known as Capri-Sun.

Capri Sun was an amazing product. Made from juice concentrate, the 6.75 silvery pouch was, in my mind, a miracle of physics; trapezoidal when full, yet rectangular when flat. With a flared bottom, this amazing container was able stand upright when placed on a horizontal surface. AND…it came with a straw.

I had never seen anything like it.

With a price point that far exceeded the ten cent milk that we kids consumed four days a week, Capri Sun was not destined to be a daily drink. [Early release on Thursdays meant lunch at home.] It was, however, perfectly priced to be an occasional offering.

Like on field trip days.

Remembe(RED) is a memoir meme. This week’s prompt was about a memorable school trip. In order to keep it tightly written, a limit of 600 words. Despite some amazing choir tours and field trips to Disneyland and other places, the first thing that came to mind was the silver pouch. As always, constructive criticism is welcomed!