alphabethsoup

when i was a little kid, my mother always used to pack a bag lunch for
my little brother and me to take to school every day. our lunch usually
consisted of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a juice box, some sort
of fruit (usually an apple or grapes), and a cookie.

she also packed a similar lunch for my dad to take with him to work. the main difference between the two was that she always substituted the cookie with a fun-size snickers bar.

she used to keep the bag of snickers in the refrigerator, and we weren’t
allowed to eat any of them. they were for my dad’s lunch, so they were off-limits. i’m not sure why, but this was one of the few rules i obeyed as a child.

when i was in fourth grade, the mars company was having a contest
involving the fun-size snickers. inside each wrapper, was a letter.
the letter was one of the letters used to spell the word “mickey” –
like mickey mouse. the goal was to get all 6 of these letters, and then
send the wrappers containing them to the address on the bag. upon
receipt, you would be eligible for a free trip to disneyland.

during this time, i was actually allowed to eat one per day. i don’t
remember any other time, before or after, where she’d let us eat one out
of our dad’s lunch supply, but she did then. i used to get so excited
about the letter in the wrapper, that the candy inside was of little
importance.

most of the letters were relatively easy to find, and came up multiple
times in our search. out of all of them, ‘k’ was the most popular,
while ‘y’ was the least: we couldn’t find it at all.

every day, i’d race home to get my daily snickers, and every day, i’d
excitedly open it up to find any letter but ‘y’.

and, every day, my dad would come home from work, and before i could say
anything, he’d say, “sorry, hon.. no ‘y’ today.”

it had become something to look forward to in an otherwise dark and
unsettling phase of my childhood. it didn’t matter what else was going
on: that bratty little girl could steal my favorite pencil, my best
friend could tell me she never wanted to talk to me again, i could get
picked last for whatever sport we played that day, or better yet, i
could get hit in the face during dodgeball. as long as that ‘y’ was out
there, all of those things seemed fairly minor and insignificant.

one day, i came home from school, and my mother was smiling. i felt my
heart leap.

“guess what?”

“the ‘y’!!!! the ‘y’!!!”, i exclaimed.

“your dad got it in his lunch today!”

it was surreal. to this day, i can still distinctly remember how It
looked. the mildly shiny white wrapper, torn a little from being
opened. the faded brown ink of the coveted ‘y’. i had waited for it for
so long, and now that we had it, it was so much more than a candy wrapper, or a ‘y’. right then, i felt like i had everything, as if life was one big puzzle, and suddenly everything had clicked into place perfectly. if my idea of heaven is true, and you simply live within happy moments for all eternity, then that would be one of those moments.

we sent off all of the letters to the address on the bag, just like the
rules said, but we never heard anything back. i think i asked my mom
about it a couple of times, but eventually lost interest. i don’t
remember ever feeling sad about the lack of response, and i don’t even
think i realized we had actually lost the contest until years later.

in retrospect, the “y” had been so difficult to find, that it became the
contest in itself. once we finally had it, i couldn’t even remember why
we had needed it in the first place, or why it had been so important.
it just was. it had given me a reason to wake up in the morning, to
find purpose in my life during a period of time where i had been
struggling to find any.

sometimes, i think i’ve been searching for that ‘y’ my whole life, as if
we never really found it. the ‘y’ takes on different shapes:
quintessential ashtrays, bags, apartments, jobs, phones. anything to
break the monotony, or to fill certain vacancies in my life, even if
only temporarily.

just like walking home each night, or reading a good book, the process
is always better than reaching the actual finish line.