lunch pails (m)

I am sitting in front of H's school in Cambridge and am 30 minutes early.  My cell phone is dead and I make a note to get it replaced, once and for all.

I have a book with me but it's a little heavy (Devotion...a woman finds her spiritual self) and I'm not in the mood to think big thoughts.

So, I people watch.  What catches my eye is a group of youngish men (everyone is younger these days) coming from the school with their lunch boxes. This is the construction crew, done for the day.

I look at the various types of lunch carriers.  There are a couple of those throwback metal containers, one paper bag, a few Igloo brand plastic containers, and--a man after my own heart--a big insulated bag with a shoulder strap.  To kill more time, I try to imagine what they each had for lunch.  Instead, I find my mind going back in time to lunch at St. Anthony's school, circa 1969.

There were 43 of us in one classroom.  No cafeteria.  We brought our lunches to school and ate them at our desks.  The place reeked for an hour after lunch.

Susan D had tuna fish every day for 8 years.  Her cousin, Elizabeth, ate peanut butter every day. George H, the Ukranian boy, ate cream cheese and jelly on white bread.  William G never ate.  Victor D. ate meatballs 3 days per week and peppers and eggs on scali bread the other 2 days.  But the most memorable lunch award goes to Lorraine H.  She was a creature with greasy hair, bad skin and was beyond weird, as was her entire family (a sister was beheaded by a helicopter blade).  Everyday, she brought in two boiled eggs in a plastic baggie.  She would place the eggs (in the baggie) on her desk and take out her metal ruler (15-inches) and roll over the eggs until they turned into a yellow liquidy mass.  She would mush it all together so that the mass would be concentrated in a bulb at the end of the baggie.  Then, she would spring free a bobby pin from her dandruff-ridden hair, pierce a small hole at the bottom of  the baggie and suck on the bag until she drained it.  The whole scene was the nastiest thing I ever saw.  The room smelled like toasted farts.

What occurred to me for the first time today--some 41 years later--is that while I sat next to Lorraine and watched in disgust, I never missed a beat eating my own lunch.