School lunches. I can't think of them without getting a little bit sad. My mother had a busy career and - quite wisely - put us in charge of making our own lunches to take to school.
My mom didn't allow us to buy chips or the coveted Twinkies that our classmates enjoyed. In fact, all I remember having to put in the bag was a PB & J and a red apple. A bad combination in a metal Scooby-Doo lunch box. By noon, my sandwich was damp and flat and smelled of old fruit.
Naturally, I was always trying to bargain a trade out of my classmates but I didn't have much of interest to swap. My friend Tammy's mom worked at a supermarket, so Tammy had a free and endless supply of Ho Ho's, Little Debbie Cakes and Fritos. I sat with Tammy every day.
My mom would buy junk food for special occasions. I was the kid on the school field trip with the flat, damp, fruity smelling sandwich and the frozen can of pop, bowed out at the bottom and still undrinkable by noon.
Elizabeth Street Elementary sold milk from a cart. In the third grade, I was chosen for the coveted milk cart position. I left math class ten minutes early to go down to the gymnasium and set up shop. Milk from the cart was 3 cents. Wednesdays offered a chocolate milk special, for 5 cents.
By then, I was buying "hot lunch." It was 50 cents and we waited in long lines, looking at our money to see if we had any 1976 "Bicentennial" quarters. It was institutional food, and you quickly learned which meals, or parts of meals, were edible and which were not.
In Japan, mothers prepare a boxed lunch for their children known as o-bento. O-bento aren’t just lunches, they’re like a lunch, a love note, and
art all at the same time. Young women get up early and spend hours
packing bento boxes with carefully prepared food to impress a boy they
like. The quality of a child’s bento results in the passage of judgment
on the mother, and either praise or embarrassment from the child’s
peers.
By fourth grade, my parents were locked in the bitter fights that would
lead to their long-awaited divorce. My sister was cooking our dinners
by this point, she would make Kraft macaroni and cheese from the box,
Hamburger Helper, and she could also make good spaghetti. (She still comes and cooks for me even though we're grown up and she never cooks at home and I like that. )
I often went to school without lunch money, and had to borrow from the principal's office so I could eat. At the end of the year, I owed a crazy amount of money - perhaps 7 dollars? - and had no way to repay it. I was afraid that if I asked my parents I would be punished.
And my parents probably didn't know that I spent most of fourth grade lunch hour in the boiler room catching up on my math homework. It was supposed to be punishment for not having work done, but I honestly liked it in there. It was a warm, small space and gave me the peace and quiet I needed to go home and deal with what was happening there.
At the end of the school year I gave the lunch lady my silver dollar collection to pay off the lunch money debt. I remember her asking me if I was sure - but she took them anyway. And probably swapped out her own money for the valuable coins. I told my mother this story a couple of years ago - just in passing when we were talking about something else. Big mistake. She cries every time she things of it. And no doubt, this blog post will upset someone who would rather I didn't remember it quite this way.
