Baseball Cap Sundaes with Gummy Bears

Do you remember going to family restaurants as a child?

We always went to the Ground Round.

When you came in, they would weigh you, and then your kid's meal would cost 68 cents if you weighed 68 pounds (I actually remember weighing 68 pounds, and I remember feeling devastated at weighing 'so much'. That's not normal but I guess this post is not about premature self-esteem issues). 

Then, they handed out packs with a red, yellow, blue, and green crayon in each, and ushered you to your table, where the waitress laid down fresh puzzle-and-game papers. My brother would always work out the crosswords, hidden pictures, word scrambles, and connect-the-dots activities on the front of the paper, while I would immediately flip it over and draw on the blank back. 

There were several children's meal options- french fries were across-the-board, and with them you could have a hamburger, hot dog, grilled cheese, or the dreaded, never-ever-ordered fish sticks (which were served almost daily in our school's cafeteria anyway). 

I seem to remember very long stretches of time between seating, ordering, serving, clearing, and dessert. Now I wonder if we were there for hours, or if this was because a child experiences time much slower than an adult. 

We would play pinball and buy gum balls, using all of our quarters, and go to the bar section ("no children allowed") on the other side of the restaurant, and choke on the second-hand smoke, and spin on the bar stools. We marveled at, but never played, the casino-style machines in the bar section. We enjoyed hitting all the buttons on the cigarette machines, and running into the wrong-gender bathrooms, while the baseball game blasted on the big screen in the bar section.

Ice cream sundaes came with your kid's meal, so I always ordered the upside-down ice-cream cone in a dish, that was styled to look something like a wizard. My chosen topping was gummy bears. During baseball season, the children's ice cream sundaes were always served in plastic mini-baseball caps, which I collected by the score (we went weekly to this restaurant, after all).

I was reminded of this memory when I was trying to explain the concept of a restaurant kid's meal to my husband, who is Swiss. In Switzerland, he explained, there is such a thing as a side salad which is smaller than an entree salad, but he'd never seen a 'kid's menu' or crayons, coloring at the table, pinball machines in the restaurant, or any of the other imagery I described.

It's so fun to be married to someone of a different culture, because it helps me to examine my own. I think of that restaurant as 100% common, expected, and typical. But there are nations, probably entire continents, who would feel as if they had entered the twilight zone if you took them to the Ground Round for a plastic mini-baseball cap sundae!