When I was 15, the coolest possession I owned was a Mountain Dew backpack.
It was big, bulky, had more straps than I could ever use lugging my books to school and it was made out of this shiny green fabric that crumpled when I moved.I loved it.
I remember toting this puppy to school everyday with something in every pocket. It took me 10 minutes to find a pen as I unbuckled, unstrapped and unzipped at the start of every class. I was prepared for bad weather with my umbrella strapped to the bottom and a poncho stuffed into one of the side pockets. But the real reason I loved this backpack wasn’t because of the excessive storage space…it was because I earned this bag.
In the 90’s Pepsi had a promotion where you collected pop bottle tops and sent them in for PepsiStuff, a catalog of merchandise. I had taken the catalog from the grocery store and decided that I needed that shiny green backpack. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember how many caps I needed, but I know it was a lot. Enough to fill a shoebox. I remember because I had to buy a shoebox from my brother for a dollar, he had the biggest feet in my house and I needed the space. The box sat in my bedroom floor, with the catalog propped on top so I could see my future backpack. As the months wore on, I collected caps from my house, from my friends house and from every random bottle I found outside.
Soon I had enough caps and I carefully filled out the form and took the bus to Meijers to mail my box. There were a couple of other people in line with boxes of caps to mail and I chatted with them about what they had picked out and how they had earned their points. I was proud of my big box of caps and when I mailed that box covered with brown paper, I figured that even if they never sent me anything, I had a lot of fun with the whole project.
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