Recently, I needed to sit down with my son, Clyde, so that I could ask him a few serious questions about his juice box consumption. Clyde, I said, once you start drinking juice boxes, do you find it difficult to stop? Are you consuming more than seven juice boxes a week? Are more than fifty percent of your friends also juice box drinkers? Do you find yourself worrying about the next juice box, even while you’re still drinking one? Do you try to hide how many juice boxes you have drunk? And finally, as the result of excessive juice box drinking, have you ever wet the bed?
His answer to all of these questions was the same: one long, drawn out slurp on his straw. It didn’t matter, though—I already knew all of the answers myself. And so I just sighed, pulled the sheets off of the bed, and started to plot how best to remove juice boxes from Clyde’s life.
The best thing to do, of course, would be to keep him away from places were juice boxes were likely to be found. The “lead me not into temptation” route. Unfortunately, some of the most tempting places include soccer, friends’ houses, and, of course, school. The only way he could be more surrounded by juice boxes would be if he worked at the juice box factory.
One place I do try to keep juice-box free is my own house. But this isn’t so much because the juice boxes are a temptation to him, but rather because they are a torment. It’s like cocaine: I have always heard that the basic problem with cocaine is that there is never enough of it—no amount is ever sufficient. (Think about Al Pacino in “Scarface;” obviously, he had lots of the stuff, and yet he was still pretty funny about people taking it.)
In my house, it’s exactly the same—but with juice boxes. As far as Clyde is concerned, there are just not enough juice boxes in the world for him to have to share. It doesn’t matter how many we have, a bag full, or a truckload, it always ends the same: with Clyde up all night, grinding his teeth in worry, ever alert for the soft susurration of straw piercing foil. It means that he will come sliding into the kitchen every time the sink drains, thinking that the last gurgle is the sound of one of his precious juice boxes being slurped dry. It means that whenever I retrieve anything from anywhere on the shelf where the juice box is kept, Clyde will be at my elbow.
“Whatcha’ doin’? Can I have a juice box?”
On those rare occasions when juice boxes have made it past my perimeter defense and into the house, I know I should probably just sit Clyde down at the table with the whole case and say, “Here you go—knock yourself out,” but I can’t. It’s not that I have a problem with him drinking a gallon of juice—it’s just that I have a problem with him carving out his own corner in the landfill while doing it. I feel the same way about individually wrapped cheese sticks and cookies—they’re great for things like road trips and classrooms, but here, at home, where we all share the same germs anyway, can’t the cookies all touch each other in the bag? And can’t the juice all slosh around together in one big bottle?
Apparently not, because Clyde—who will not eat a piece of fruit unless it is rolled in bacon grease—will not drink juice out of the bottle.
Sometimes, it’s enough to make me wonder what’s really inside of those juice boxes. Who knows? Maybe they have more in common with “Scarface” than I thought.