Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501070032
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Want some coffee?" she asked, and showed me to the pot.
I filled a cup and started looking for the cream/milk/Coffeemate. She pointed to a plastic-encased blob of milk, formally called a "pouch." A short, thin straw stuck out of it. I put my cup on a cart and cradled the sloshing blob with both hands. As I coaxed out a sickly stream of milk, I could not help but wonder: Whatever happened to the good ol' milk carton?
They were seven cents each when I was in fifth grade, paid for daily with the aluminum-wrapped package of two pennies and a nickel that my mom stuck in my lunchbox. She kept a small metal pitcher filled with nickels and pennies on the windowsill, right next to the counter where she made our lunches every morning. I was mortified the day she announced: "I've always hated this pitcher," and tossed it into the trash.
Be they small metal pitchers or pint-sized cardboard milk cartons, childhood relics have a way of becoming victims of change or progress.
It was September of 1970 when I started fifth grade in Charleston, W.Va. We sewed fringe around the hems of our outgrown bell-bottoms to stretch their life. Jimi Hendrix struck me as a scary guy, but we knew he was the pinnacle in the world of music. Most of us kids embarked upon the mandatory road to musical awareness with some caution, playing The Monkees or the Supremes on scratchy record players.
In Mrs. Machincia's class, the students listen to Reba McEntire and seem to wear whatever they want - even shorts! It seems odd - odd that they can, and odd that it strikes me as odd. But it was sometime right around fifth grade that the authorities allowed us girls to wear slacks to school - as long as they matched our tops in an ensemble known as "a pants suit."
My sister Melissa, 18 months older and my childhood pea-in-a-pod, shared fifth grade, so to speak, because we were part of an fabulous experiment in elementary education. We left drab, redbrick Oakwood Elementary School for a veritable beacon of modernity, shiny Kenna Elementary. Old-fashioned, window-lined classrooms gave way to a huge room - with carpeting! - that we all were amazed to discover was called a "pod."
Melissa's class - the sixth-graders - sat on one side of the pod, and we fifth-graders sat on the other. It was some effort to merge kids of all ages, although I don't remember spending a lot of time with the sixth-graders except on the playground. Neither does Melissa.
But I remember glancing across the pod, secure with my big sister sitting right there.
That year, they had new desks, the two-piece variety, instead of the old one-piecers. They've got the new kind in Mrs. Machincia's class, although with a distinct improvement: You put the books in a metal space connected to the side of the desk, instead of right underneath the desktop, where growing kids sometimes got stuck.
But the newfangled desks have nothing on these newfangled milk blobs, the most intriguing find in my investigation into fifth grade, 1994.
At Riner Elementary, they even have a cafeteria sign: "Don't Chew or Throw Milk Pouches into the Air."
|XXXX XXXXXX/Staff Allison Blake then and now
They'll be fine;
just give them
time to grow up
by CNB