Super-Size Me

Friday morning, I stopped in at Dunkin Donuts for a cup of coffee because I actually really like their coffee.

I went inside to the counter because the drive through was pretty busy.

Approaching the counter I ordered a large coffee. I moved to the side so the man behind me could order. I heard him order an extra large coffee. When I saw his coffee, I said, “Wait a minute. That’s what I want. I didn’t know you could order an extra large”. They gladly swapped it for me. Now, I know.

All this reminds me of an episode I once had at a fast food restaurant. I ordered a medium size French fries. The girl taking my order cheerfully declared, “We don’t have medium”.

As I scan the menu board, I ask puzzled, “you don’t?”

Still smiling, she recites, “We have regular, large and super-size”.

Finally grasping the concept, I ask, “But you have three sizes, right?”

Once again, as if someone had pulled the string on her back, “We have regular, large and super-size”.

“OK”, I said very deliberately, “I’ll take the middle one”.

Here’s my philosophical complaint about these semantic maneuvers.

Obviously, the goal is to make me feel like I am eating more fries if I call the same bag “large” instead of “medium”. Unfortunately, the intellect can sometimes be a barrier to sophomoric marketing strategy.

Instead of using language to describe reality, language is being manipulated as an attempt to define (create) reality. In my opinion, that’s the tail wagging the dog. And I feel personally insulted.

Maybe a Quarter Pounder should be renamed the Double Eighth Pounder.

Halfway Down

The other day, I was going through boxes of things we had in storage. One of the boxes contained an entire set of Childcraft books – 15 volumes.

Sets of books like these were usually sold by door to door salesman. Typically, payment was made in installments and volumes would be sent periodically about once a month until you had a complete set. The Childcraft books were geared for young children, containing poems, fables, nursery rhymes and other children’s stories. Encyclopedias were the most commonly sold sets. When I was growing up, a set of encyclopedias was an absolute necessity for doing any kind of homework or research. You have to remember the only other resource available for writing any school papers was the library (no home computers, no laptops) – not a good option at 11pm with your paper due the next day.

In our house, we not only had the Childcraft set, but also the complete Encyclopedia Britannica as well as a complete set of Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedias. These were wonderful books and I spent many hours pulling one of these heavy hardbound volumes off the shelf, leafing through the glossy pages absorbing all kinds of random information. Why do cows have more than one stomach? Are there fish at the bottom of the ocean no one has ever seen? What do we really know about Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill, Eli Whitney, Christopher Columbus, Winston Churchill, Cleopatra, radio waves, the atom, or outer space?

As I opened the box and saw this old Childcraft set (they were a little worse for wear after so many years), I immediately wondered if I could find the only poem that I could recall from these books. For some reason, it was my favorite and I always came back to that page with the little boy sitting on the stairs. As I read it now, it’s not really profound or terribly meaningful in any sense. It has been there, all these years on a page in a book in a box. But this poem and this illustration have also been rattling around inside my head all these years. It was comforting to find it – something from my childhood that remained unchanged. That page was exactly as it had been the very first time I ever looked at it.

After all these years, that little boy is still sitting halfway up and halfway down.

The poet Alan Alexander Milne is best known for creating Winnie-the-Pooh and all of the associated children’s stories.

A.A. Milne died January 31, 1956, one day after I was born.