COLUMN: It's Just a Country State of Mind: What's in your lunch box?

When I was in first grade, the small school I attended didn't have a hot lunch program. We all had to bring our lunches. You could say that lunchtime was our social time of the day.

There were two groups of lunch kids; those who carried their lunch in a brown bag, and those that carried a lunchbox.

I was a brown bagger myself. My mother must not have believed in lunchboxes because I always carried those brown paper bags to school. Only a few of the elite kids had lunchboxes.

Probably 90 percent of the class were brown baggers.

We were ranked by the kind of lunch container we used. The lunchbox kids sat together at one table, and the brown baggers at another. It was a fun time at lunch to compare our lunches: what we brought and how much. It was almost like a competition at times to see who had the best lunch.

A lot of trading and bargaining went on as well. If you didn't like what your mother packed for you, if you were lucky, you could pawn it off on some unsuspecting victim.

When my family went to the grocery store, my mother would let me pick out what I wanted to take for my lunch. I always picked the same things. Pickle Pimento loaf sandwiches, bananas, fig bars and potato chips. I was a creature of habit.

I didn't have too many takers on my lunch selection, but I did not want to trade anyway. Most of the sandwiches offered up consisted of some sort of lunch meat or peanut butter and jelly. Occasionally someone would break up the monotony.

One day a kid named Ralph brought an unusual sandwich to school. He bragged about how good it was. I always thought during my whole six years of existence that eggs were for breakfast. But when the egg sandwich surfaced out of his brown bag, all the boys lit up. Excitement rang out in their voices and trades were being offered. A Twinkie for a bite of sandwich? How about an apple? It still made no sense to me.

Finally, the coveted egg sandwich would find its way to Ralph's owner while Ralph on the other hand ended up with the motherload of some kid's lunch. The lucky winner of the egg sandwich held his prize for everyone to see.

Later on down the road, I would learn the truth. It turned out that Ralph was smarter than most of us. You see he really didn't like those egg sandwiches that his mother made for him. But he pretended to like them. Ralph went on about those old sandwiches like they were made of gold. After a while, everyone started believing him. Soon, everyone wanted Ralph's sandwiches. His sandwiches became legendary. To win one from him was the highest reward. That's what I would call good marketing. He was a natural salesman. In the order of things, I would say that Ralph had arrived. He had found his niche early in life. He was head of the hierarchy of the first-grade lunches. He was king of the brown paper bags. He had a great run that year.

That is until the following year. That's when the school started serving hot lunches and that pretty much did away with our lunch trading program. From then on, most of us bought our lunches. We were all served the same thing every day so there was nothing left to trade.

Those first-grade years are long gone but every now and then, when I eat a Fig Newton bar, I remember that small classroom of long ago.

We were all entrepreneurs in the making. And we were in the presence of genius and didn't even know it. Sometimes I still think about Ralph and wonder if he is out there somewhere, still pedaling those egg sandwiches. He might even have his own fast-food chain by now. Guess I will never know. But the real question here is, "What's in your lunchbox?"

Happy New Year!

Susan