Lunch Buckets

When I had been in school for a couple of years, and knew the language fairly well, I still hadn't picked up on cool. For instance, I didn't have a cool lunch bucket. I didn't have a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry box. Nor did I have a  Rocket Richard even though he came to speak at Austin Heights Elementary.  With a large French Canadian population, Coquitlam was a hot-bed of Rocket Richard and the Habs adulation.
 
My lunch bucket was this puny cube shaped thing with two handles that folded over the top for carrying. Robin's egg blue. Not cool. This isn't really surprising as I never hooked onto that cool thing anyway, except for a short stint in junior high when jack boots were in. Even then, I thought for the longest time that they were called jet boots. Don't get me wrong. I knew that smokes rolled up in your tee shirt sleeve was cool. Leather biker jackets with studs and zippers and a patch on the back was cool. As was flames on the side of a '38 Merc. Brylcream and ducktails and waterfalls were all cool but just didn't work for me.
 
I played football practically from my first day at junior high but that didn't really ease me into cool either. I played in runners for the first year as I didn't want to ask for the money for cleats. Part of it was because I was large for my age so I always played on the senior team but I wasn't in the same cool age bracket. By the time I was in the age bracket, cool didn't seem to matter any more. I drove a '56 Consul for god's sake. And lunch buckets had long been given up for just a plastic bread bag.
 
Lunch buckets were important again in the working world. When I went to my first construction job away from home, I borrowed dad's black box and thermos because it didn't look brand new. Ditto for coveralls and tools. It didn't do to show up for work with brand new everything because credibility would be at an all time low and that status ladder in the eyes of co-workers can be a long climb. Over time, I was able to substitute my own tools, coveralls, and lunch bucket.
 
That was many lunch buckets and thermos bottles ago. When thermos bottles were still made of glass, they had a unerring ability to commit suicide from great heights. Now that thermos bottles are universally of stainless steel, they just collect dents and thus gain respectability. And my last working lunch box was a Tupperware tub. Cool.