Store Bought: Part 3

In my family, you were not allowed to open your toy until you finished your Happy Meal. Not that I ate Happy Meals very often. I bet I’ve eaten less than fifteen of them in my life. I’ve eaten enough, though, to remember that after you eat your french fries, your fingers get all greasy and it’s difficult to pry the plastic packaging open to get your miniature Barbie out. I remember the excitement of holding a warm bag of salty food on my lap on the way home from one of Rebecca’s hockey games. I remember sitting at the McDonald’s in Gardiner, Maine, with my Dad, dipping greasy nuggets into sweet and sour sauce and thinking that I was experiencing fine dining.

Around eleven or twelve – the prime age to switch from Happy Meals to Number Five Meals with soda instead of milk, and cardboard, not paper packages for fries – I stopped eating fast food almost entirely. I’m not sure why it happened. Maybe once my sister went off to college we spent less time on the road. Maybe I had learned to pack my own dinners by then. Maybe once I started running track my body craved more wholesome food. Maybe I was finally old enough to sit through the entire three hour trip to Belmont, Massachusetts to visit my grandparents a few times a month without needing to stop at the Kennebunk rest stop on I-95. Most likely it was a combination of all these things. It wasn’t a sudden decision on my part to protest fast food. It just happened.

During the fall of my sophomore year at Cony High School I was in cross country, jazz band, jazz combo, pep band, symphonic band, and piano lessons. Eating at the Bangor Street McDonald’s became a necessity some days, but I was surprised to find that I wasn’t hungry for Number Five Meals. I didn’t particularly want anything on the menu, except, perhaps, a Happy Meal. My memories of them endured, and I can truthfully admit that they were happy meals.

I didn’t get Happy Meals anymore, though. Usually I bought the Fruit and Walnut Salad. It wasn’t particularly good, but it at least didn’t make me queasy to look at like the burgers did. McDonald’s had slipped out of my identity. When I walked in, I no longer saw la vie en rose. I saw dusty corners and plastic forks in plastic wrappers. I saw a line that stood between me and symphonic band in fifteen minutes. And when I saw it like this – all naked and splotchy – I couldn’t defend it. I couldn’t convince myself that yellow-green pickles and moist hamburger buns tasted good.