My father was always the lunch-packer in my family. Meticulous in his approach, he’d carefully construct the contents of each elementary school bound paper sack, from Ziploc-ed sandwich to frozen box juice.
The juice, in his system, served a sort of critical double-duty – both as a drink, and as an ice-pack to keep the sandwich fresh through a morning of backpack confines.
Problem was, as the box slowly thawed, the outside would accumulate moisture. By the time even the first recess rolled around, each day’s lunch bag had entirely soaked through, slowly turning into a moist brown pulp that stuck to the sides of my book bag, and wet textbook corners into slow fan-shaped expansion.
Having peeled off bag scraps, having piled the contents table-top in an undistinguished heap, the problems persisted. Because, even as the bag had been soaking, the contents of each sandwich, otherwise safe in plastic confines, had been similarly seeping through the bread.
Which, at the time, always took me by surprise. Certainly, given a few hours, ketchup should inevitably ooze through all but the hardiest whole wheats. But turkey? Who would guess that a slice of white meat’s meager moisture would be sufficient to soak your standard sandwich slice?
Some sense of elementary-school propriety prevented me from telling my father about the problems at the time, though, in retrospect, I’m sure he would have been more than happy to help me solve them. Still, laboring on against the slow disintegration of each home-packed lunch, I always looked forward to the days when I could buy lunch at school instead.
Buy, I suppose, is a relative term, as we traded in not money but tickets for our chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. But, for a seven-year old, those tickets were better than gold – tradable for tinfoil trays of such timeless yet nowhere-else-found classics as ‘Mexican Pizza’.
Even better were the prototypical Lunch Ladies serving up each meal, plump women at the far end of middle age, in hairnets and orthotics, hovering above us, spoon in hand, with menace and protective love in equal counts.
As I aged, as tinfoil and tater tots slowly gave way to Yale Dining Halls china and mashed ‘potato’ served with ice-cream scoops, even as I squared off against such incomprehensible foodstuffs as chunky, brown ‘Soylada’, school food always held a special place in my heart. Bland, monotonous, and devoid of nutritional value as it may have been, at least it was never a threat to the interior of my book bag, and simple to keep in its atomic, separated, individual, non-seeped-through parts.