The Old Coot get's distracted by a paper bag. Article # 1022 Published March 20, 2024)

 The Old Coot gets lost in the past.

By Merlin Lessler

 My wife bought a jar of honey the other day. The clerk put it in a craft paper bag that reminded me of the ones I took to school when I was in junior and senior high. In elementary school, we walked home for lunch, but once we made it to 7^th grade, we rode a bus from our elementary school, across town to junior high with a bag lunch in our grasp. We carried our books under our arms, covered in craft paper that matched the lunch bags. No book bags or back packs in those days. I guess I grew up in the dumb generation.

Our school had a cafeteria, but many of us, either couldn’t afford, or couldn’t stand, to eat the slop that the lunch ladies plopped on your plate. The only thing I purchased in the cafeteria was government subsidized milk, and once a week, a sliver of ice cream, served on a cardboard dish for ten cents.

Things changed in senior high. There were no school buses. You either took a city bus, walked, or were lucky enough to have some older kid in the neighborhood with a car who would get you there and back for a buck a week. At 25 cents a gallon, it was a profitable venture. If you played sports, with after school practice, you walked home or bummed a ride. Hitch hiking was another way of getting around in that era.

The other change in senior high, was where we settled in to eat our lunch. There was a bakery just a few steps from school and for reasons unknown to me, they let us crowd in to eat, even though most of us just bought a container of milk. It was a mob scene, so crowded that it was hard to get from the front door to the beverage container in the back. We stood around like munching cows in a pasture. My bag usually contained three sandwiches, a boxed snack pie and an apple. I’d weigh 400 pounds if I ate like that today.

When I made it to eleventh grade, my lunch room shifted to the pool hall down the block. I learned more there than I did in class, but the subject was street smarts. It cost ten cents to play rotation or eight ball, a penny a minute for straight pool. Those games were fairly innocent. It was the money games that improved our street smarts, nine ball and six ball. We had an hour for lunch; it was enough time to lose a week’s allowance with a missed shot on the money ball. The Lotis brothers, who owned and ran the pool hall, collected a fist full of dimes and got a garbage can full of empty paper lunch bags as a reward. Oh my, all that from a jar of honey in a paper bag.