Teenie Beanie Shame

Nowadays it’s pretty common to bring cloth bags to the grocery store. In fact, at some fancy stores like Whole Foods you’ll get the stink eye if you don’t bring your own bags. But I grew up in the 90’s in Buffalo, NY where this was not the case. My dad was an environmental engineer and wanted us to avoid waste and extra packaging so he’d insist we’d bring cloth bags to our grocery store. When we got there, the checkout workers would just be confused and look at us like we were crazy, “but we have bags! We have paper and plastic!”

As a twelve-year-old I found this humiliating. I didn’t share my dad’s concern for the environment and began to rebel at home.  When he left the house, I would leave the lights on in rooms, after I had finished using them! If he left on longer trips, I would use the clothes dryer, no line-dried crunchy towels for me!

My biggest transgressions occurred across the street at my friend Meghan's house, which had everything a preadolesent heart desired. We would eat individually-packaged Pepperidge Farms cookies. We’d spend hours in front of her big screen TV. But what I loved best were her dozens and dozens of Beanie Babies. Do you remember those? They were cheap-looking toy animals stuffed with plastic pellets. As twelve-year-olds we were too old technically to play with them, but they had “collector’s value.” We would wear gloves as we slipped their never-removed labels into plastic sleeves for protection. We would spend hours looking up their current values on AOL and arrange them in tiers according to their worth.

I had a couple of Beanie Babies myself, but my collection was nothing compared to Meghan’s, and I never expected my environmentalist father to endorse buying more of the plastic-filled useless objects. I was in for a huge surprise.

One day, after breakfast, my Dad looked up from his newspaper and asked “have you heard that McDonald’s is giving away small Beanie Babies in their Happy Meals? Would you like to go today?”

Was my environmentalist Dad abducted by aliens? I was suspicious but too excited about the Beanies to refuse. “I’d love to!” I practically shouted, “can I bring Meghan?”

We drove to our closest McDonald's, but when we got inside, Meghan and I saw a sign that said “sold out!” I thought that would be the end of that. But Dad had me ask if there were another McDonald’s that still had them. I was nervous to ask the super cute cashier with the nose ring, but the pull of the beanies was strong. The cashier told me that the nearest place would be the Walden Galleria, all the way on the other side of Buffalo. I knew that would be a waste of gasoline but amazingly my dad said, “let’s go!!”

When we got to the McDonald’s in the mall there was a long line, but eventually we made it to the font and my dad ordered “five happy meals!” I gasped “five! But we just ate!”

Dad said, “It’s okay! We will just freeze them for later!”

I thought the idea of thawed McDonald's a bit gross, but when I looked into the bag and saw Twigs, the miniature giraffe I felt a lot better.

On the way out of the mall, my Dad wanted to stop at the bookstore to check out the bargain rack in the back. Meghan had to use the bathroom, so I was given all five happy meals. The bookstore had a sign that clearly said “no food or drink” but I noticed there were Sweet Valley High books right in the front display. Maybe I could just lean in and take a peak. As I leaned over, the sodas turned over in my bag and... whoosh! All five happy meals simultaneously burst open, there were fries, burgers, and Beanies everywhere.

I was in front of the balcony and dozens of people on the second floor saw me were pointing and laughing.

At this moment, Meghan was coming back from the bathroom and she saw the mess. She turned around and went right back to the bathroom.

I thought maybe if I cleaned up all the food quickly I could just lie and tell my dad that I got really hungry and ate all the things. Instead of going to waste the food would go to my waist.

I was manically grabbing the soda-soggy fries with my hands and running them over to the trash bin. As I bent down, I heard my dad’s voice boom: “what happened?”

“I’m so sorry, all the bags exploded and it’s all my fault.”

My dad looked at me seriously a moment, then asked, “well are the Beanie Babies okay?

“I think so! They're individually packaged!”

“Good! I hear they have collector’s value!” Then my dad started to laugh and I felt relieved. The plastic packaging had saved the day.

This day marked the end of my rebellion against the environment. As I stood surrounded by all the McDonald’s packaging, I felt gross and that it was morally wrong to take more than I needed. This set me on the path towards becoming a science teacher, where hope to pass on the lessons about caring for our planet that my Dad taught me.

I’ve always wondered about why Dad sacrificed his environmental ideals in order to take me on a wild Beanie Baby chase. Perhaps he’d bought into the tales of their “collector's’ value” and imagined they could be part of my college fund. However, I think that much more likely, he saw how important they were to me and made an exception out of love. And it was this exception that made me finally decide to follow the rules.