Programming Memories In My Children

So this year, I’ve started putting strange things in my children’s lunches for school.

I know, the customary thing to do to make a big deal of it on the Internet is to put a little love note or drawing into the lunch boxes and then to produce ready-for-viral listicles of images. But I’m not a mommy and I’m not artistic. So the lads get some strange foodstuffs indeed.

It started when, as a lark, I put a tin of Fancy Feast cat food in their boxes.

Then, a couple weeks later, I thought about putting some brownie mix, unprepared, in the Pokemon and Sonic the Hedgehog comestible containment devices. I was at the store at the time, but I could not find inexpensive (sub-buck) brownie mix, so I picked up three boxes of Jiffy Yellow Cake mix. The next day, they each got one, and I baked the third so they could actually have cake when they got home. One of the lads, good boy, opened the cake mix and ate some of it at school.

I considered giving each pack of microwave popcorn two weeks ago, but I demurred. Because I wasn’t sure that one of them would open it, and that would be a waste of my beautiful wife’s preferred snack of late.

Today, I gave each an ice cream cone. No ice cream; just a cone.

Someday, perhaps when I am gone, they will get to talking and say, “Do you remember when Dad put something in our lunch?” And they’ll think of me.

Or perhaps they’ll mention it to their therapists. Regardless, it’s building my immortality, one little bit of remembered silliness at a time.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories