lunch

Just started reading, "Bird by Bird" - Anne Lamott where she mentions that one of the first assignments she ever gives her students is to talk about elementary school lunch time. So I thought I'd take her up on it.

When I was 8, lunch was a weird event. It was indefinitely a status maker or breaker in the grandiose world of elementary school. I think I may have lucked out a tad, since my mom was a teacher - but in general, lunches could mean death or sure survival to the average 7-10 year old.

My best friend Christina always had the best lunches. Her mom would, daily, cut the crusts off her white bread sandwiches and divide it into triangles. Triangles. Not squares or two rectangles, those diagonal cuts would add a whole new dimension to the sandwich. Triangles said you were hip, and gave you plenty of corners to bite off. Christina's mom also used a sweet mayo - which I now know is salad cream, but at the time, I remember thinking, "Aunty Bev's sandwiches always taste better." But that's not where it stopped. Oh no, there weren't just cookies or chips or veggies cut into fun shapes...Chris would whip out her 'My Little Pony' thermos with its blue top and it'd be filled to the brim with...wait for it...Spaghetti-Os.

Saucy, fun shaped and tasty - those lukewarm SpaghettiOs were always part of share time between me and Chris. If anything could have made Christina cooler at age 8, I'm waiting for y'all to tell me. When I was about 12, and sort of missing my elementary best friends (I ended up going to a different middle school), I went to Costo and got a 6 pack of SpaghettiOs. They were disgusting. Too sweet, mushy and saucy, they lived for the next ten years in our kitchen cabinet until they were donated to a food drive. Whatever magical allure Chef Boyardee had for me at age 8 went away the second they weren't served from a plastic thermos any longer.

The best thing about my best friend is that she was generous to a fault. I mean, over the top. I've always been lucky that way. There was never a day when Chris wouldn't share some of her preservative filled pasta or one of her mom's amazing cookies.

On the other hand, my dad's latent creativity and propensity for frugality led to some "interesting" lunches. Cha siu sandwiches...with mayo. Tuna salad with egg salad. (which isn't that bad, per se, but starts to smell 1/2 way through the day) Wheat bread, never white. Too much mayo. Later on, it was salad with lunchmeat and fruit. I think the thing I hated the most was the bananas. I don't know how or why, but bananas ripened faster than a ho stripping at Tommy Lee's house in my bookbag. And then I would ignore them. And they would stay inside my lunchbag indefinitely. Until the stench got to be too much. See, my dad's frugality also meant that nothing was wasted. If you didn't eat it the day before, you had to eat it the next day. Squashy, brown banana when you're 8 is like eating death. Point of fact, I didn't even like bananas until I turned 20. And ate them directly from the fruit bowl instead of the one that had sat inside my lunch bag all day.

Even though I am still very much a child of ritual, my tastes have changed since I was 8. When I was 7-10, the first lunch of every school semester was ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS, egg salad. It was a special request, and school wouldn't have properly started unless my first day of class had an egg salad sandwich and sour cream and onion chips in my lunch bag. I don't know what made me love this squishy, squashy + crunchy combo. The amalgamation of flavors, dehydrated cheese and fat and salt still makes think of the first day of class. I don't even remember when I stopped liking egg salad. And the nouveau comeback of deviled eggs makes me nostalgic for more than gingham tableclothes.

Every now and then, on a Friday, I could convince my father to give me a whole dollar and ten cents for hot lunch - which quite honestly, was a novelty. You would go in the morning, down to the lunch room and put your money into a little envelope on the wall. I think it was the same envelope they used to paste into library books; the lunch room ones were all arranged by class. Manilla with an itemized list glued on top. You'd write your name down and be on your merry way. It almost became a point of pride to eat hot lunch on Friday. Your best friends did it, and if it was pizza? Score. It wasn't til we were 10 that we started to notice that the pizza "crust" was really leftover waffles from the morning. To add insult to injury, they were whole wheat waffles.

But Friday was almost always the day to get something with mashed potatoes and gravy. Synthetic mashed potatoes and weird gelatinous gravy and cubed turkey. The coup was if you got served tater tots (Thursday was tater tot day). Tater tots and a oddly pressed burger with ketchup and some overcooked veg were delicious served out of those pastel plastic trays that you had to stand in line for and get from the lunch lady.

Lunch isn't the same anymore. These days, you still wait in line, but it's for a gut busting burrito or oily Chinese food or a overpriced salad. But I wonder if this is where my love of mac and cheese or french bread pizza comes from. The feeling that something synthetic, pre-prepared and overly seasoned is somehow better. And sometimes, I yearn for the days when I was happiest eating a triangle of sandwich and some sweetened canned pasta.