OK, I just spent too long pouring over a website that sells nothing but lunchboxes. For starters, I skipped past all the nylon sacks and mod bentos and went straight for the metal category. Warning sign number one. Scrolling through cartoon characters and logos old and new, I stopped for a moment of purely aesthetic appreciation for the red and brown “I’m a Pepper” and the beige, green and orange Orange Crush boxes, thinking of J’s story of the damage these pre-OSHA time bombs could wreck: see whirling dervish with slippery grip meets sister’s brow. As if all of this wasn’t already woefully retro, or “vintage” as J noticed his record collection handily classed in a recent browse through a used record store, the nostalgia alarms became impossible to ignore when I found myself nearly purchasing a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox exactly like the one I carried to Trinity Lutheran School on Old German Church Road in 1984. Understand, Strawberry was the talisman of my youth. Everything I wore and surrounded myself with, for a time, had to be red, the color of her berry charisma. My devotion to her hung on for years but ended before her move to Saturday morning cartoons. For me, she was a character only, a visual cue for that thing the elders refer to as Imagination. I spent hours everyday speculating on the doings of Raspberry Tart and Plum Pudding and Strawberry’s cat Custard in their parallel universe that carried on simultaneous to my daily experience. At school I would wonder, what are they doing right now? Other times my existential queries probed deeper: What do their bathrooms look like? What do they eat for breakfast? Two things are apparent to me now, with the distance of 24 years: I was never a plot-driven kind of gal (the conflict and other trappings of typical story patterning always bothered me, whether it was in books, movies or Saturday morning cartoons, it always seemed superficial), the first sign of the writer who would later find herself via Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf; and, most obviously, the foodcentrism of all these imaginings.

Much is made of early food memories— that anyone of discriminating taste as an adult surely had a sensually epic childhood of meals one might still prepare for oneself and the transport those meals offer to a place of comfort and simplicity. And this creates an interesting question I may return to, but for now I’m struck by the power of non-edible food memories like my Shortcake years. The fruity-scented mops of hair, the iconic berry as both architecture and décor. In the days before merchandising filled in every imaginative aspect of a childhood character’s universe, a berry was not only a berry but a girl, a house, an ethic of gentle kindness, a sound that possessed semantic-bending powers, i.e. “Have a berry good day.” Paralleling the years in which literacy is being formed, is it not possible that a slippery sequitur like this is a very healthy thing? That –and her antioxidant profile— has renewed my appreciation for this curly redhead in a way simple nostalgia could never explain. Hell, maybe I’ll get the lunchbox after all.