A few years ago, when we got a microwave oven at the lab, I started bringing leftovers to warm for lunch. I needed something to carry all the little containers and utensils in, so I used a rickety old lunch box that Benny had when he worked at Peerless Wire for 13 years. It's one of those nice big silver-colored ones, with a red handle, and a rounded lid that a thermos fits under.

I never anticipated the varied reactions and comments that the old lunch box elicited from the graduate students when I carried it down Purdue's ivy halls.

Like, "Hey, Jeanne, where's your hard hat!"

When I changed jobs, the lunch box moved with me from Chemistry to the University Business Office where it continued to draw attention. Several Business Office types, upon eying it,  volunteered a little uncertainly, "Oh, I like your lunch box."

One lady in Purchasing told me flat out, "Oh, I love your lunch box! My husband carried one like that for years."

Anyway, being a true granddaughter of Claude Alward, I have the ever-present urge to tell you a story this Christmas, and it involves the old lunch box.

It was a cold evening in February. I was driving home from work. On Concord road, which is fairly unpopulated as it heads out of town, a bird that was about the size of a blue jay but that looked like a hawk, flopped across the road in front of me. One of its wings was dangling.

Instantly, I pulled the car over on the side of the road, emptied my lunch box, and started chasing the bird across a wintry Indiana field in my high heel shoes and business suit, carrying that old lunch box.

Well, I don't think would have caught him, but he took refuge in a clump of bushes against a little ridge where he was cornered. He was a very pretty bird - sort of brown and black striped. He had a curved beak that looked sharp, so before I attempted to pick him up, I took off one of my gray wool mittens and cautiously dangled it in front of him. Instead of attacking it, he shied away, so I scooped him up and put him in the lunch box, mitten and all, and snapped the lid shut (don't worry, it doesn't close very tightly).

Benny was standing in the kitchen when I got home.

"Guess what! I've got a little hawk in my lunch box!"

Benny just rolled his eyes.

I immediately called our vet, and eventually wound up talking to a lady with a southern accent from a federally funded agency called WildLife Rehabilitation. Her name was Jeanne Jacobs. She wanted to get the bird right away. Since she lived on the west side of town and we lived on the east side, we agreed to rendezvous in the McDonald's parking lot at Tippecanoe Mall in half an hour. We exchanged descriptions of what we were wearing and what color our cars were. I looked over at Benny.

"Want to come along?"

"I guess," Benny answered, trying to sound nonchalent. (He was getting curious.)

When we got to McDonald's, Jeanne had us climb into her car. I sat in the front seat and Benny sat in the back. I handed her the lunchbox, and we watched as she removed the bird gingerly and started wrapping him in a towel. He was clinging to the mitten.

"Now give the nice lady her mitten back," she said, extracting it with some difficulty from his talons.

"He can keep it," I said.

She told us he was a kestral falcon, Indiana's only native breed of falcon.

Sometime in April, a gentleman from WildLife Rehabilitation called me at work. He wanted to verify the location where the kestral was found because the bird was ready to be released to the wild and they were going to take him to a familiar place to release him.

"You did a good thing," he told me. "It had probably been injured for several days, and that's how you were able to catch it."

Well, that wraps up my Christmas story for you all this year. Benny says that wasn't the most interesting story of the year. He says, what about when we went to the Attica Potawatomi festival parade to drive the old Fauber's truck and learned that there is really such a thing as a Potawatomi Indian. The float ahead of us carried a reenactment of an Indian village. One very tall, dignified gentleman in particular had such a beautiful and authentic looking costume that I was prompted to ask him if he made it in the Eagle Scouts (because we once had a friend who did this).

"No, ma'am!" he said emphatically. "I am a real Potawatomi Indian, and I've come all the way from Kansas to be in this parade."

Oh, well. I didn't even try to explain myself, I just took his picture.

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