School Lunch

I don't remember what I had packed in my lunch pre-moving to Buffalo Grove. It doesn't stand out in any way to me. But I distinctly remember the importance of the contents of lunch when I entered fourth grade at Longfellow Elementary.

My new friend Marisa had great lunches. White bread with yellow cheese. Maybe there was turkey in there. An apple. And my dream - a baggie of Doritos.

My lunch consisted of Polish rye bread. Either the long narrow kind chocked full of seeds or the really dark almost black kind that crumbled when attempted to be eaten in a sandwich format. The bread was heavily buttered. Inside was cut up, hard, Polish kielbasa with a strong, spicy smell. The small unruly pieces loved to tumble out of the bread. I also had an orange, a baggy of radishes and a juice box.

I learned very quickly how to survive at Longfellow with that kind of lunch.
Rule #1 - all of the contents remained in the brown bag at all times until I was ready to deal with them one by one.
Rule #2 If I wasn't totally starving, I could eat the orange, drink the juice box and pop a few radishes in while no one was looking.
Rule #3 If I WAS totally starving, I allowed myself to eat a few bites of the sandwich but only if I kept most of it in the baggie and most of the baggie in the brown bag. To the untrained eye, I was eating some sort of a sandwich but by the time it got to too many questions I would shove it all back in the bag and head for the trash.

I'll never forget when some girl lost her retainer and had to dive for it in the trash. I remember her coming up and saying, "EW it smells like sausage in there." I threw my entire lunch away site unseen that whole week.

These days I'm totally weirded out that people love grainy, dark, long breads and that white bread is a thing of the past. Recently Linda, a co-worker, fought me for the last remaining pumpernickel bagel in the staff kitchen.