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If you are too young to remember the “school field trip” then this doesn’t apply to you.  Or you might not remember that you went to school at all, if that is the case, I know of a couple of facilities that will take good care of you which you might want to consider.  You have to have a certain frame of reference that gives you an appreciation of what it really meant to have a field trip and to have a super covetous, yummy sack lunch to go along with seeing the world’s largest ball of yarn, or the zoo, or any number of events that you school deemed important in order to have well-adjusted children.

The school field trips were always an event that was looked forward too with great anticipation.  The event, yes, was for “getting out of school” to be sure.  But mostly it was an event that centered around the sack lunch.  Kind of like the Kentucky Derby is kind of about horses but it is mostly about how to showcase the types and styles of hats that women will wear with all the fashion that surrounds it for the year.  It seems that all children see themselves as being starved and never having enough food- which in my case was true.  Normally we didn’t get a sack lunch, or for that matter lunch at all.  We might get a crust of bread or the left-over oatmeal—there was always left-over oatmeal.  But on those rare occasions when we did get the sack lunch for the field trip, I think my mom made some effort to make it worthwhile (at least in her eyes).  Unfortunately, the competition was fierce and she just wasn’t prepared for the pro level.  I mean it wasn’t like there were other kids to take care of or a house to maintain—those pesky details. 

There was a certain protocol in the trading of items within the sack lunch caste kingdom.    If one kid had pudding, and another had a drink then it could be traded for each other or to someone with somewhat equal items.   But the brazen and uneducated slouch might ask to trade his bag of carrots for a fruit pie or Ding Dongs—which is not even a close trade.  That would be like trying to trade a Chrysler Minivan for a high-performance Ferrari.  Hostess products were the gold standard of the sack lunch kingdoms.  The barter system was a complex mixture of Class Warfare with appropriate pecking orders, Keynesian Supply Chain Economics all centered around the slick-oily-bravado of a used car salesman plied together at the picnic tables.  Those with nothing to lose sometimes came out on top where as the kid that had it all just didn’t know that everyone else didn’t have it all—it showcased the classic attempt of the redistribution of wealth.  Some are just destined to be poor sack-lunchers for the rest of their lives.

Keep in mind these were the days before the advent of the “Lunchables” which are seen on the store shelves today.  The marketers of today were the poor sack lunch tribes of yesterday—they fixed a terrible wrong of youth, but then they created a time-space continuum and black-hole of “its not good enough” from the next generational eyes.  They created a paradox—you just can’t win the perceived injustices of the lunch kingdom.  It seems that there were five social strata levels—ones with hard sided lunch boxes (the apex predators), ones with appropriately sized lunch sacks, ones that had the full sized paper grocery bags that were used to haul ore from the salt mines—you basically announced that you were carrying your lunch in a burlap gunny sack.  Next the coat pocket lunchers and finally the ones that didn’t have lunches at all (these were the most dangerous)—they had nothing to lose.

The vehicle of the lunch was only part of the cool quotient, it was the treasure inside that was the denomination of cool.  Let’s start with the sandwich, it was super cool to have your cotto salami or bologna sandwich inside of individualized plastic sandwich bag with lettuce, Miracle Whip, mustard all on white Wonder Bread.  Next was a package of chips or if not a package, then another baggie of chips, again individualized- they weren’t just tossed into the lunch bag and crushed to death with the rolling can of soda.  Next came either a piece of fruit or carrot slices or some finger food veggies (again, in another zip lock bag).  Then the piece de resistance, a Hostess Pie, Ding-Dongs or Twinkies.  And if your moms loved you enough you got an apple juice.  The lunch box was made for that cacophony of goodness and the second tier was the “lunch sized” brown bag, everything else you might as well have, “born and raised with wolves” tattooed on your forehead which was then wrapped in an old burlap bag.

I, of course loved the field trips but the lunch portion was a slight embarrassment for me… this of course meant my parents didn’t love me.  What I usually got was a sandwich made of homemade whole wheat bread that basically crumbled when sunlight hit it.  It was always wrapped in wax paper and never in the very cool and convenient individually wrapped sandwich baggie.  I probably got a half a cabbage or a full ear of uncooked corn to go with it and maybe a hunk of homemade cheese or homemade apricot fruit leather.   Now don’t get me wrong there is nothing better that fresh whole wheat bread out of the oven with butter and honey or jam, but I just couldn’t haul around an oven to the field trip very effectively, else I would have. 

The sandwich slices were larger than normal- sometimes approaching 1-1/2 inches thick because you needed that width to overcome the internal turgor pressure to hold the slices together, it must have been immense.  Part of the reason the slices were usually cut an angle was because the knife “walks out” when cutting such large slices on a high wheat density bread, so in effect you could get a wide piece on top and a narrow piece at the base which means a complete breakdown in the morphology of the bread – I think it had something to do with covalent bonding of wheat, or the Coriolis effect on the spin of the earth.  Whatever the real reason was, the perfect white Wonder Bread, it was like the Sistine Chapel in comparison to the peasant hovel with a thatched roof and dirt floor.  Wonder Bread was the epitome of cool… so you can see, we never got that at home- my mom was trying to “take care of us” and “save us from” unhealthy foods…. I think she forgot that all kids live forever and there was no reason for concern.   She also bought me Toughskin Jeans, with 1/8 steel mesh knees for reinforcements but that’s another story…

Now the bread or base of the lunch was only a part of the story, I think we only got peanut butter and honey… and that’s not a bad thing but envision this, you have, what amounts to bleu cheese consistent bread, crumbling in the presence of atmosphere and a peanut butter being spread on top of it.  The brand of peanut butter of course was the Adams Brand—if you are familiar with Adams Brand, this is the peanut butter that doesn’t spread, it has a gravel type consistency that tears bread apart, they use Adams Brand peanut butter to sand the Space Shuttle motor housings—nothing smooth.  Then the oily mess that sits on top of the gel doesn’t get mixed in very well either—there is no effective way to get a smooth buttery spread with Adams- it just isn’t possible.  Like I said it has a smoothness of road base and I have heard that they use Adams brand peanut butter as the binder for wood chip pellets.   Apparently, my mother was into health and nutrition so white bread and Jif or Skippy peanut butters were swear-words.  There was on more than one occasion which we got a bread, butter and sugar sandwich—just let that sink in as to the oddity.

Not that all was the slog of indentured servitude was bad—there was one occasion that I did get a Cotto Salami Sandwich with chips, a drink and a Hostess pie in a proper sized lunch bag.   That was when I knew that my mom loved me.  It also happened around the same time as when ¾ of the kids were gone from our house, and that there was no more cabbage and all the leftover oatmeal was gone.   Who knew?

You might think that I am being overly facetious when I say that I was starved as a kid, by my parents, and that I might be just remembering it wrong, and that it didn’t happen to farm kids in rural Idaho… but I’ve got the data to support this and you would be wrong.  Growing up we never had any fun foods. Everything was the drudgery of “gruel” and the “good for you” foods.  I’m sure we worked from predawn to dark every day.  There were no McDonald’s, or Wendy’s just down the street- this was prior to the explosion of fast food.  We lived in the country and other than driving a tractor to town, my bike would have been the only way to get to these establishments and my bike didn’t have a seat. All of the good stuff was like hundreds of miles away, in Boise, or it might as well have been.  These places were not place’s that my mom believed in or would take us.…. I don’t think we even had a TV; can you imagine that?  Domino’s wasn’t invented and the only time we went to pizza was after the season banquet party in little league football.  We only would get foods like “vegetables” and “homemade” from scratch stuff or produce from the garden.  The concept of left-overs was as foreign to me as living on the moon, they were as rare as good sense in the US Congress.  It just didn’t happen.  The only exception was oatmeal, that seemed to be in large enough quantities for a second helping if one wanted- I did not want however. 

My parents, every once in a while, would buy cold cereal, but that was like winning the lottery—it usually was consumed in 1 setting by what seemed like a hoard of hungry mouths, like it had never been seen by human eyes before. I believe we had a resource limited mindset at the time.  There was never going to be another incident of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box to grace our house again, so best eat up now!!  Cold cereal was built in a vacuum and never lived in the real world… fruit loops were in the realm of unicorns and didn’t exist in what we thought was reality.  Mothers seem to have an aversion to sugar and happiness- but maybe it was because they saw the results of the dentist office visits….  Like that even matters, right?

My mom seemed to have higher aspirations in life than what food represented to us smaller humans that are sometimes referred to as children or kids, and it seemed and that food priority and eating was lower on the pyramid than her artistic endeavors.   I had an aunt years later admit to me that my mom used to marvel to her that she could make food stretch (I’m sure this was accomplished by using fillers such as sawdust or silage). And if you think this is hyperbole, just ask my sisters.  They now overdo any food get together with larger amounts of table fare. I think this was to compensate for the guilt and to balance the system of our winters of want.   Looking back at the time I didn’t know that this wasn’t the way everyone was treated—such is youth.  That is until I went over to a friend’s house and saw how the other half lived and then I realized that I really was being starved by my parents.

My friend Dave’s family had recently butchered one of their hogs.  I didn’t even know what bacon was or where it came from.  I might have read about ham at one point in a Dr. Seuss book and the only time  I had experienced a pork chop was in the form of a few cubed pieces placed on a plate, surrounded by mountains of vegetables and the left-over oatmeal from the earlier part of the week.  I thought that hogs were raised in 1×1 cubed portions.  One might get 3 to 4 little pieces at dinner and that was just how it went; who knew that there was a thing called a “whole portion”.  While over at Dave’s place they asked me to join them for dinner.  I think they saw my gaunt bony frame and figured that I was the closest thing to a starving African child and took pity on me.  As they were serving the food, they passed the plate that had multiple pieces of meat all stacked up on it—they were called pork chops and they offered me one.  With a stated look of amazement, I, without thinking, shot back, “you mean I can have whole one?!”.  Something must have triggered in my mind that day.  One does not have to deal in fractions of protein at the dinner table and vegetables aren’t necessarily stated in terms of multiples either.  There can be a whole pork chop and one ear of corn; you don’t have to compute this crazy new math with thirds of this and multiples of that—that being said oatmeal should be the only exception- that one should be stated in micro grams.

I was in gastronomical bliss, I felt like I had reached food enlightenment that afternoon- I had actually had a whole pork chop all to myself; it was a pivotal point in my life.  No parrying of forks and knives to fend off the Mongol Hoard that wanted one of the 3 pieces which were allotted to me all cut up into cubes and told, “that was a pork chop”.  No, I had actually seen a whole pork chop, a real one, and it was good.  Maybe that is why knowledge is so dangerous.  Once you know what a whole pork chop is, nobody can pull the wool over your naive eyes and tell you something different—like 4 cubes is not a whole-anything, no siree.

Hours later I went home and before thinking if it was a good idea, I ran up to my mom and proclaimed that I had had a whole pork chop for dinner…. I was gleeful and satisfied.  I’m not sure I understood the look she gave me, whether it was satisfaction or jealousy.  I look back now with a certain level of appreciation of what it takes to feed those that do not have ends to their hunger and that not all “happy food” treats you happy, years later, but she did ask me if I wanted some leftover dried oatmeal.  I politely accepted, but while her head was turned, I stuck the lump in my shoe and later deposited it under the stairs where all the previous dried lumps of oatmeal were deposited… but that is an entirely different story.

I have on one of my book shelves a children book that I have had since being about 4 or 5 years old.  This is a book, like a Dr. Seuss book, which has pictures and a small story line—at the time I imagine the pictures were the selling point for me.  I bought the book, but I bought it with “my money” or what I thought was enough money.  I was old enough to know about money but not old enough to not know that money wasn’t an all-encompassing denomination, I think in my mind if you have money no matter how much, you can get whatever you wanted—1 penny was as good as 10 dollars it didn’t matter.  Money is money and its all the same- that was my perspective.   

Back in the day there were no malls like there were some years later, it was just the stores which ran along main street.  Then malls sprang up and even strip malls in neighborhoods.  Now malls are seemingly going away and Amazon.com is king.  I imagine in time there will be a next big thing whatever that is.   This was Boise, Idaho in the early 70’s.  Things might be thought differently back then including my own perspectives—so as I get older, I wonder if maybe things aren’t as different as they really were thought to be—but maybe it’s our perspective that is the different factor.  People as I have found are really not that different and probably haven’t been that much different for ages- situations change and the methods and modes change but not the human.  As a 90’s song goes, …people are people…, so why should it be… that you and I should get along so differently.

Kids still fight over a cardboard box and over a nice expensive toy- they don’t care, for the most part they are oblivious to value as we understand it as adults.  If the other one has something and the one wants it, then they get into an argument.  How they play together is not taught, nobody signs up for the class in childhood selfishness… it’s kind of instinctual.  They can be mean little cusses, but that’s alright too, there wasn’t a time when they were “not supposed to be selfless” in their lives.  The time from infancy to toddler is all a function of only being out for themselves, they don’t look out for anyone else, they aren’t supposed to.   I think it is just called age-appropriate behavior.

Therefore, good behavior and well-disciplined kids are a function of training– Certain behaviors can be explained by age and the perspective that we have at that time.  Dave Ramsey said in a phone call I heard once, “children do what they want, adults prepare, plan and execute”.  We move from what we want only to what we should do, and then moving forward to preparing for the future—hopefully…, all these things are under education and training.

Babies cry to be feed, toddlers whine when they don’t get their way, children pout when something gets in the way of what is expected… and then teenagers are… just teenagers.   As kids, they push back on doing things for themselves, they learn to walk, not because someone schedules time to do it, but they push through it by instinct… maybe to move faster than what they did, maybe to explore and see things faster, maybe trying to copy what everyone else is doing… walking.  Who knows exactly, but it seems as if there is some motivation to start to take care of ourselves and push back to not have things done for us, then the further we push to be more independent; we start to choose our paths in training and pursuing a certain level of actualization.

The method of buying and selling goods and services has changed, but not in a tremendously different way than what it has been like for 1000’s of years.  It was main street, then the mall, now to Amazon… but the trading is still the same at it has been for a very long time—the market, the method perspective is different, someone makes something, in hopes of selling it for a profit—then a bunch of somebodies buy that thing, it could be a regular commodity like food, but ingenious humans have a way to create want where there is none before.  Think about it, 50 years ago was there a market, consumer desire to buy Apple Watches or I-Phones…, they hadn’t been invented yet… our understanding of Apple products was limited to applesauce, apple juice or apples themselves—markets hadn’t been invented, because the product hadn’t been invented.  Markets are not like some finite pie that there is only so much to go around, markets are created and then go away all the time—markets are also driven by emotions.   

We have a level of understanding when a 3-year whines to not eat his veggies, but we wonder what is wrong when a 25-year-old whines when putting up a fuss to no eat his veggies—they should know better, right, they have more experience and should have level of better understanding, better educated, not driven by emotion.  What about an adult who is able to work but seeks out welfare—is it an emotional issue, is that a training issue, is that a laziness issue, a resource issue, an imagination issue, a lack of grit issue, accountability issue, an uncountable number of numbered issues—can it be boiled down to an issue or group of issues, I’m sure its complex, and a certain level of perspective too- right.

One thing that I’m seeing more and more, due to my perspective is that of self-interest… there is not much that we do that is not first centered around self-interest, if you are familiar with John Locke, Adam Smith and some of our early American based philosophies which have early founding of the right of property, choice, independence, they all have underpinnings in that of self-interest– which is different from selfishness.  We can still help someone else out to fulfill some self-interest and it can be not selfish —which in turn drives our market economies, choices in what we choose to do, where we choose to live, what our profession is—nobody tells us that “you should be a plumber” or that there is only room for “this” many plumbers, that is entirely market driven and that is the ironic thing, how is the market driven.  It just is… not one entity tells or is in control of it, it’s a culmination of it all.  It really is an amazing thing to see the market forces at work.

Now to the bookstore in downtown Boise Idaho back in the early 70’s.  I walked in with my mom to the bookstore and found me a book that caught my eye- undoubtedly, however I don’t remember what I was thinking, it was a long time ago.  The name of the book was called, “The Zoo That Grew”, just a children’s book, but I undoubtedly thought that I would like it and deemed it to be my book—I wanted, right.  I had a penny in my pocket, it was money and I walked up to the cashier, gave her my money and thought to myself, you have a book, I have money, it was a fair trade.  I had money and I had given her all that I had and thought that was the close of a good deal.  That was my perspective, hers was a bit different of course.  She knew that the book cost a bit more than what I had overall and didn’t want me to walk out without paying what the market demanded.   It costs this much and if you are willing to pay that then it is yours, that was her perspective- my perspective was wrong in the real world.  Therefore, because she had more relevant information and was more experienced in money aspects, was an adult, then her perspective won out in the market world that we were dealing in.  Therefore, not all perspectives are correct.  How can they be… even though there are factions of people who may say otherwise.

My mom undoubtedly paid the balance of the cost of the book and I had my book—but I did not know that at the time, as I said, I had my penny, she had her book and I thought it was a fair trade.   Perspective is many things but it’s not always right, not all perspectives can be right.  That day the market force was in play, someone traded some denomination of money for some goods and service- we met on the market and nobody told us where it was, or what it was, it just was.  My perspective has been fashioned a bit over time, alignment to a certain degree, push back in other ways.  Choice to do what I want but not at the expense of others…. All of these things are part of training and education.