Point 1: T&C Surf Designs.
In 2nd Grade, there was a kid who was liked more by the teachers and other little girls (like I even CARED what they thought) than anybody else. His name was Bryan Dahlberg, and he must've been the richest kid EVER. Why? Well, because he showed up to school in what seemed to be a brand spankin' new T&C Surf Designs t-shirt with matching shorts. I don't know if you remember T&C Surf Designs, but most of the designs had a big cool-lookin' gorilla surfing, lookin' all cool with sweet shades and stuff. The symbol was a yin-yang thing and it was SO COOL you have to believe me. And I was stuck in the back wearing a poop-brown crushed velvetish shirt with a dorky collar much bigger than my neck and my Toughskins jeans probably found in the clearance section of K-mart. 10 years ago. No way I was getting little Aimee McCallister's attention now. I never felt poorer.
This Hobie shirt I'm wearing above is the closet I ever got to a cool surfing t-shirt. I wore this pretty much every day.Point 2: Dorito's
Not just Dorito's. Your OWN PERSONAL BAG of Dorito's in your brown-bag lunch, or, even better, pulled out of a shiny GI Joe lunchbox. If you were lucky enough to be the kid with your OWN PERSONAL BAG of Dorito's, then you were the envy of the entire table. The whispers would go around the table..."That kid must be rich." "How can his family even afford that?" "Yesterday, he had an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FLAVOR!"
I'd see that and go home and BEG for Dorito's. "Okay," said my mother, "we'll get you some Dorito's." So I told my friends, teachers, and anyone who would listen. "I'm getting Dorito's in my lunch!" And the next day I'd have Dorito's in my lunch. In a plastic sandwich bag. Not a nice sandwich bag with a ziplock seal at the top, the cheap ones you have to fold over and hope that nothing falls out. In front of everybody, I had to pull this transparent, crappy bag out of my lunch. My lunch that was in a sack that used to contain a loaf of whole wheat Old Home bread, bought a month ago at the day-old store. You know, with the bread crumbs still in the bottom. The bread crumbs that got all over the whole tomato my mom put in. Yes, a tomato. I would've left it in the bag and thrown it away later, but what's the use when you have a transparent bread sack?
Nevermind the fact that my mom was raising 11 kids (at the time, maybe 10 or 9). Nevermind the fact that I always got a healthy, well-cooked meal for breakfast and dinner every day. Nevermind the fact that the tomato was garden-fresh, picked the day before. Nevermind the fact that my mom was so "Green" that she reused everything she possibly could, including Kleenexes, way before it was socially acceptable. Nevermind the fact that I had more Dorito's in my cheap sandwich bag than the Rich Kid with his OWN PERSONAL BAG. Nevermind all that! I'm in elementary school! I have an image to uphold! I don't want to be the poorest kid in the class! I want my OWN PERSONAL BAG OF COOL RANCH DORITO'S!
Point 3: Brick Oven
We never, EVER, went to sit-down restaurants. In fact, one of my greatest anecdotes to tell now is how I won a writing contest in the Orem Geneva Times in the 2nd grade. The contest was for Mother's Day, and my teacher had us all write a short paragraph as to why we love our mothers. I wrote: "I love my mom because after we picked up all the prunings in the yard, she took us to Burger King." This is paraphrasing, I wish I had the original. Maybe it's in the Family History somewhere.
I'm pretty sure I won the sympathy vote on that one, because I took 1st place. Our family got what was probably the best prize ever: 40 dollars worth of Little Caesar's pizza. For one day, we lived like kings.
So imagine my jealousy when I would go to school and hear about the kid whose family went to Brick Oven for his birthday. I didn't even know what Brick Oven was, but from his description, it sounded somewhere between heaven and an amusement park. "They had a guy come make balloon animals! And they gave us free breadsticks! And I got an ice cream sundae afterwards!" Man, that kid must be RICH.
Point 4: Picture Day
There's nothing worse for a poor kid than picture day. You show up, thinking it's just a regular day of school, except every kid in your class except you had an envelope and a check from their parents to give to the photog. They were wearing their coolest surfing t-shirts or whatever girls wear to look good, and discussing what package they were getting.
"I've got package D. There's 1 big picture, 4 medium ones, and 10 small ones."
"Oh, that's too bad. I've got C. 2 big pictures, 8 medium ones, 20 small."
"Really? Seems small. I've got A." A hush falls over the crowd. "10 big pictures, 50 medium ones, 512 small ones. I've got all sorts of people who want pictures of me. It costs 150 bucks."
Wow, I thought. That kid is RICH.
"What about you, Kent? What package are you getting?"
Then I realized that the smallest package, E, still costs more than "Free". I lied, and said, "C" or something believable. But the truth was, I only got the class photo, which was free. I didn't even get in line for the individual photos. Just went back to class after the class photo was taken. Nothing made me feel poorer.
Of course, I know now that Picture Day was just a tremendous racket for the photog. Show up, take a bunch of money from little kids, take a ton of photos, take the next year off. One day of work a year sounds about right.
Point 5: Super Soakers
I'm not sure why I equate supersoakers with wealth, but I was always at a serious disadvantage in waterfights with my small gun that held about 2 squirts' worth of water. There were lots of toys that other kids had that made me envious and think they were rich, but the only one I'm thinking of right now is supersoakers.
Point 6: Skiing
This is the penultimate separation of the haves and the have-nots. The skiers would buy their overpriced ski coats and wear them from September to June, just so you knew that they skied, and for all you knew, they were great at it. This is probably the only point in this list that actually accurately reflected a family's wealth. Skiing ain't cheap. And it's pretty fun. But to hear the skiers talk about it, you'd think that skiing was a day of unimaginable fun. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW AWESOME SKIING IS. And of course, it's just implied that you're awesome because you ski. The best part about skiing is that nobody really knows if someone's actually good at it or not until you see them on the slopes, which rarely happens. So you could just say that you're awesome, wear your parka year round, and everybody's convinced. Why didn't I try to pull that off? Instead, I wore this coat until my mission, everybody in school knowing full well that my idea of fun was building a half decent snowman at best (I'm on the left):
Now that I'm a parent, I will make sure this little guy has to go through the exact same things I did. I'm going to a thrift store to buy him hand-me-downs. I can't wait until I put that first tomato in his lunch, next to a sandwich bag full of imitation Oreo's.
15 comments:
You failed to mention that the snowman was constructed in Texas, where we had to scrape the entire lawn's snow together just to build the snowman. Ultimate poverty- we didn't even have enough snow.
Now that I'm a mom, it sure makes me want to make my kids think they're poor- we live in too high end a neighborhood for that, but they do think we don't live nearly as well as everyone else. Which is probably true. Hopefully.
Nice work. I'm hoping my kids appreciate what they have by living here, but it might just backfire, since the school they go to is pretty nice. They do wear uniforms though, so that cuts down on clothing envy.
I pretty much had the exact same anxiety growing up. Mine was more about having ACTUAL LUNCHBOXES and neater-looking Barbies (the richer you were, the more taken care of your Barbies were). After all, I had Butchered Belle as a Barbie and Michelle's (who I played with) Barbies had ALL their hair and it was neat, too! RICH.
Notice how my shirt was tied in a cool knot 80's style. That was my one really cool shirt because it had hot pink and Alison Smith gave it to me. Of course.
You really got the picture-day embarrassment down. I think it was the worst on the day that we got the pictures back and everyone had the giant picture of them in the envelope window but I had like tiny little picture of me (just as well, since I was pretty hideous back then.)
This is such a great post. I had anxiety over my parents not letting me subscribe to Teen or YM in the FOURTH grade--which I'm pretty sure they did for both financial AND moral reasons.
James and I discovered that he was a RICH kid. I had no idea. He would have mini-bags of Doritos in his house that he could just pass out to his friends after school! Can't even imagine.....I was a poor kid for sure.
LOVED this one!! we hafta raise our kids to appreciate soggy sandwiches and fold over clear snack bags!! it's pretty much mandatory!! Pride sucks. =)
thanks for sharing!
Hey, houses where I grew up go for 1.5 million AT LEAST right now. You could have been like me, lived in a mansion but on church welfare. You think I'm kidding, but that was the reality. I went to a school with a bunch of millionaire babies and I lived in a huge house with a pool, but that wouldn't overcome the fact that I would wear a St. Louis Cardinals shirt on picture day (Reds fan) because they were on clearance at the outlet store. Moving to Orem and becoming Kent's friend made me feel right in.
Definitely! Poor for me was not owning hardly any clothes that were bought from a store besides the ugliest, cheapest, coat on earth. I wanted to die of shame when my mom made an ABC print shirt in 5th grade. I don't want to go that far with my kids, but there is something character-building to not having it all! Lots of things, actually.
This was a great post, Kent. I think I might have actually been the one to get you that Hobie T-shirt at a garage sale or something. I like Bruce's quote which is something like, I want my children to grow up poor but I don't want their parents to be poor.
Holy shiz the clear bread bag lunch sack! Or how about just in a plastic grocery bag? My mom sent me to school with just a slim fast shake wrapped in tin foil once. Not kidding.
I remember specifically getting an Old Navy t-shirt with the logo on the front from D.I. and feeling like I was wearing DESIGNER DUDS. Most of my other shirts somehow had a jackson hole logo and silhouette of an elk...
I always order a drink at dinner these days. In the Collard household that got you the lazy-eyed death stare from my dad and an immediate rebuke. In fact I had a nightmare the other day about my friends coming to dinner with my family and my dad asking them to pony up the cash for their part of the meal when he got the check.
Unfortunately all my friends growing up were rich... which is precisely why I ended up living at Belmont in college.
Good grief I could go on for days. So I'll stop. But not before I comment on your little munchkins preciousness. He's a total Hansen in that baby bath picture. Hope you guys are adjusting well. Mel looks great!
I can really relate to the comments about lunches and doritos. Coming from a health nut family doritos were out of the question, in any appearance, but I still remember just wishing for a treat or cookie in my lunch! I confess I pack those as well as the occasional chips for our lunches :) Great thoughts. It is interesting to think back about childhood and which experiences we really want our children to have.
There certainly was a plethora of surfing shirts being worn in my day. As if everybody went home after school every day to go surfing. It amazed me to see the things other people did and what they had, because I didn't even know they were LEGAL, let alone available.
i don't get it.
but funny stuff. don't you love when childhood trauma turns in comedic gold?
Of course jaime doesn't get it. she was the one who would get package A, have a new backpack every year, with the cool matching lunch box. I don't know how we ended up getting married because I try to et my kids to feel poor, but she quickly shuts that down with some sort of lunchable. By making my kids feel poor, of course I won't be able to enjoy my own oreos and cool ranch doritos...unless I hide them.
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