The Happy Meal

Somehow the boy got it into his head that road trips meant he got to stop at McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal, which had a toy in it. The toy was all he cared about, but to underestimate the degree of that care was a mistake. He was persuasive in a petulant and unacceptable way, throwing a fit, crying, then refusing any request I made, like for him to eat. He may have been buckled into a kids’ car seat, with limited ability to cause trouble, but the trip had been smooth, with him and his brother absorbing content through their screens and headphones in bliss, and me with my podcasts and recent albums by aging rock stars from my youth, with names like Gibbons and Nielsen. I was about the eldest’s age when I would pass time on road trips with hits recorded by those same names playing through the earphones of a Walkman. I hadn’t had a screen, just music and printed materials.

I didn’t mind the content on their screens, even if I knew the consecutive hours they spent on it on road trips scrambled their brains somewhat. I could tell it did when they didn’t notice we’d arrived somewhere, even home. That never happened with books and Walkmans. But the shows themselves that they watched were pretty good, scripted TV serials mostly. The plots may have been ridiculous and the dialogue corny, but at least the shows had plots and dialogue. The damage was limited compared to the content available with WIFI. Without streaming, social media, or YouTube, the worst they could do was to OD on bad scripted animation. These were my considerations. They were happy with the options they had. Watching those shows was what they’d have chosen to do at home anyway; this was just much more of it. I’d limited their access to social media, Youtube, and video games, and so far it had worked. They didn’t clamor for any of it, and that thrilled me, and surprised me. Even I’d been enthralled by video games at their age, growing up in the Atari and arcade era. Knowing how far games had developed since then, especially portable versions which would’ve been Mattel electronic football for me, and how immersive and addictive they were, I admired my kids for avoiding that road, not knowing how long it would last. It was the eldest. He was the one captured by narrative — stories, books, worlds, characters, mythologies, legends. Games had some of those elements, but he got it from books, and his brother followed his lead, mimicking his older brother’s reading skills as he developed them for himself. The eldest wasn’t into video games, so the younger wasn’t either, and that worked well for the moment.

The trip was going smoothly, so while I could’ve played the tough hand and made the younger suck it up and have whatever lunch we could find, I wanted to get him McDonald’s. I wanted to reward him for handling the long drive well. I wanted to make him happy because seeing him happy brought me joy. I spoiled him when I could. I still vaguely recalled the feeling of having my imagination completely captured by a toy, of having an idea in my head of what it might be like, if I could have it, hold it, play with it, of holding that idea up to the reality of it, should I ever get the chance. Even cheap plastic toys in bright colors and poly bags. Sometimes especially those. Maybe they seemed more within one’s grasp, more tangible somehow, more powerful. If I could recall even a small bit of that feeling in my heart, then how could I deny the boy, knowing how soon all that would go away?

Happy Meals themselves and their unknown joys within, I could recall quite well, having been around the younger’s age upon their introduction. I had wanted the cardboard box with the little handles and the mazes and word games on the sides, and to find out whatever the prize was, the toy, suspecting it to be worthless, even then, even as the boy might have himself. Still, the desire of it, the want for it to reveal itself to me. Who could control that as a child? Who would want to?

Save for the Happy Meal, though, it made little difference to me which fast food restaurant we stopped at. Stopping at one was one of the excitements of the trip. I wasn’t going to pack along some healthy alternatives. I had already accepted that we’d stop at one, and that we’d all eat some corporate meat product that I knew to be harming our bodies, our communities, our land, water, air. Our economy, our basic social fabric, were being eroded by the relentless greed and lack of ethics, perhaps an inability by definition to even possess ethics, of huge corporations, fast food just one among them. McDonald’s, one of the crown jewel models of American capitalism, had made themselves into an inescapable presence in our lives by appealing to our own evolutionary cravings of fat, salt, and sugar, then turning them against us through ruthless business practices, mind-warping ads and, all generous farm subsidies and trade policies. Citizens paid into and supported this model voluntarily, championing it in some cases, showering it with additional riches and cultural significance, all for the ability, the right, to purchase cheap, empty calories and to consume them in large quantities, anywhere across the land. Did knowing or believing all that to be true make me hate McDonald’s? No, not really. I still enjoyed their food. I ate it infrequently, but I couldn’t claim to dislike it. I hadn’t packed any nut sandwiches for myself either, after all? Did knowing it make me hate America? A voice on the radio had just been saying that radical leftists wanted to teach children to hate America by focusing on the horrible truths of its history. I wasn’t going to try to tell my kids the truth about McDonald’s. I did tell them that we couldn’t eat it too often because it wasn’t the healthiest food. That was how we’d arrived at the situation we were in — the road trip was the sometimes for it. I hadn’t counted on the stop necessarily having to be a McDonald’s, but that was where we were, as I scanned the blue signs near highway exit ramps for gold arches on a red background.

I didn’t need to look for long, as soon we were soon slowing down somewhere between Atlanta and Montgomery. The restaurant was in view and the turn in was smooth, but the parking lot revealed a large crowd. Every spot was taken, and a line of cars waited just to get through. Were they trying to get In or out? I couldn’t tell. People filed in and out of the doors. They couldn’t get through either. Who were they? They couldn’t have all been interstate travelers, although the road, and gas stops, had been filled with vacationers, beach or mountain bound, noted by their vehicles, gear, and group sizes. But the scene at the restaurant didn’t look like that. Their vehicles, gear, and group sizes seemed to indicate that they just lived there, within a short drive of that McDonald’s. It was noontime and they were just getting lunch. They weren’t on a road trip with a kid who only had a Happy Meal toy on his mind, and two other people who just needed something to eat, one of whom was a vegetarian.

“We can’t,” I said plainly, already turning hard to the right to avoid entering the parking lot. “I’m sorry. It’s too crowded.”

“We can’t go to McDonald’s???” the younger exclaimed. “Aww, no!!!” I could see the flailing and head drooping from the rear-view mirror.

We had passed a Burger King just before that had a big, yellow and red playground in front. I knew it was a longshot but I threw it out anyway: “What about Burger King? It’s right here, not crowded, and has a big playground!”

“Aww, no!!!” the younger exclaimed again with more flailing.

Now his brother chimed in: “He only cares about the toy!!!” he yelled. “Burger King doesn’t have toys!”

“They might,” I said. Didn’t they used to?

“Burger King doesn’t have toys!!!” the eldest yelled again. “Everybody knows that!!!”

This was the vegetarian, who would only eat french fries from wherever we stopped, now yelling at me in support of his brother, whose request he knew to be unreasonable, but which he accepted as his brother’s way. It frustrated him at times, but he defended his younger brother’s right to his own autonomy. It was a dynamic they shared as brothers that was separate from their relationship with me. The yelling, I had tried hard as I could to model against, but it was undeniable that in some sense they were the people I had raised them to be, I and their mother, separately.

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll keep going until the next McDonald’s.”

“That won’t be hard, dad,” the eldest said, voicing my exact thought. “Almost every sign has McDonald’s on it.”

He could read the blue interstate signs and probably had been doing so for years. He knew just about as much as I did, that on certain stretches of interstate in the south, McDonald’s was often the only “Food” on those blue signs. What he likely didn’t know was that on some in particular, the other was Blimpie.

There was a McDonald’s at the next exit, and the parking lot was less crowded. We parked near the door and went in. The boys wore masks, but no one else did, except for some of the staff. One woman was ahead of us in line, two men in neon yellow t-shirts waited to the side, holding drinks. Three more neon-clad men came in behind us. The woman ahead moved aside and we stepped forward.

“Take you order?”

The young clerk made brief eye-contact before shifting his glance to the side, then to the other side. I told him the order, which he punched in and which appeared on a screen visible to me as he did so.

“Does that complete your order? Does it look right on the screen?”

The total was under twelve dollars. He tore the receipt and passed it to me with two fingers through a gap in clear plexiglass, along with three cups, without ever looking at me again. His was a job that was automated in many restaurants around the world.

The boys couldn’t agree on a table. I needed to use the restroom and didn’t want to bring them in. I thought that having them seated at one table together would be safer while I left them unattended, but when they started yelling about why they didn’t want to sit at the other’s chosen table, I abandoned my efforts, set the cups on a third table, and went to the restroom. When I came out, they had settled on the third table. None of the people who’d been waiting had gotten food, even after I’d filled drinks and returned them to the table with their snapped lids and wide, durable plastic straws of yellow pinstripe. I didn’t begrudge the wait or the workers preparing the food. The work was hard, pay low, hours long. The public contained significant percentages of a-holes and idiots, a smaller but still significant number who were both. It was unfortunate that the lack of general affability created an atmosphere that felt more tense than it need be, for a restaurant or any place of business. The customers, even with the percentages, could still have been pleasant, more patient, kinder, with just a basic greeting and acknowledgement of humanity. But the job didn’t include smiles, as much as corporate powers may have tried to instill it. The work, the hours, the insecurity, the harsh reality of the life that the meager pay afforded all worked against basic humanity, one’s own and others’. This dynamic was coupled with racism, blatant and subtle, but real, and a heightened racial dynamic stoked, amplified, argued about in media. The workers were of varied ethnicities, as were the customers, but the general sense of agitation that permeated the interactions could not be teased apart from the racial reality that we all lived in.

When my number was finally called, the woman handed it to me with no additional words, and no eye contact. I brought it to the table only to discover no ketchup in the bag. I walked back to the counter and drink area, and scanned for some. The pandemic had ended the pumps that had long dispensed the stuff via paper pill cups, and self-serve packets had vanished long before then. One had to speak with a clerk. The counter was clear as people who’d ordered stood back awaiting their numbers to be called. But the woman was very busy, and she apparently avoided all eye contact with people standing at the counter as practice. She must have been used to voice interjections, probably not polite ones, to get her attention, but I thought it might improve her day ever so slightly to have her attention gained by eyesight ahead of a verbal request for ketchup, despite my irritation at the extra steps needed to obtain ketchup for fries that came by the bag-load in every order. She must have known that easier public access to ketchup would have improved her shift, but she was likely prevented from acting on this knowledge by corporate policy. The reduced interactions may have even allowed her to put a little more of herself, such as with eye contact, into each of them. But as it was she wasn’t budging. I was about to raise a hand a speak, but I’d been standing there long enough for another worker, wearing a different uniform, maybe a manager, filling iced tea canisters, to step in and answer my sauce-based request, smiling as he did so.

Now contented, the younger sat with his legs crossed, eating his McNuggets in small bites. He would wait for the car to open the toy, a tie-in to the new Space Jam, which he hadn’t seen. His plan, unspoken beyond flails and cries, yet fully realized in his mind, had come to pass. I was happy to see him like that. It reminded me of how I used to feel when I finally got a hold of one of those chunky plastic Happy Meal toys, savoring it, stretching it out, knowing its thrill was limited. The pickles and onions of the cheeseburger I chewed as I watched him reminded me of being a kid, too.

That man on the radio had it all wrong. I wanted my kids to enjoy McDonald’s the way I had. I didn’t hate the country that brought us that. But those workers didn’t need to be in such sorry states, nor did the customers whose own lives were harried, short on lunch breaks and cash. That McDonald’s at the previous stop didn’t need to be the only affordable option serving lunch in that area. McDonald’s may have been smarter by making the Happy Meal and its toy a known quantity. I’ve read that it accounts for around 10% of their sales. But do we all need to be in the business of keeping them cheap? Keeping the beef, potatoes, oil, Chinese plastic cheap and profitable? Especially when those who reap the profits are poor stewards of communities and their environments, across all stops of the chain, from production, to point of sale, to clean-up and beyond. Who who had money and power was helping improve the lives of the people in those restaurants? Who among us was helping society? Who was hurting it? The man on the radio said that it was me, that I was the danger, the threat to American society. But I was just a customer. Knowing the truth wasn’t going to change that. I didn’t want it to. I only wanted the truth itself to change.

Sated with salt and sugar, we slurped our drinks to the bottom and stuffed the cups in overflowing bins on our way to the car. A bit weary but with many miles to go, we fired our engine and merged into the whoosh of cars and trucks carrying people and products to a thousand different destinations ahead, one of which was our home.