As I try to carve out a writing life, I’ve begun to follow a lot of prompts. Not prompts as in my stomach growling to remind me to have lunch (purely, hypothetical – I never forget to eat lunch) or as in a notification from my phone telling me to stop surfing Google working and get up from my desk and move around. I’m talking about journaling prompts – the kind you can find in lists on Pinterest or that comprise whole books. They can be reasonable (‘Write about your first diary. What did it look like? When did you get it? Why?) and sometimes inane (Imagine you are an elven maiden. What color is your dragon and where are you going on vacation?)
There’s a couple of tremendous things about following such prompts – even the vacationing-and-dragoning-elven-maiden ones. First of all, they are an excellent practice in faith for a writer. I have found time and again, as I follow said prompts, that I am surprised at what comes out on the page. What I write is almost always further than I can think. Meaning that if only I have the faith enough to sit down and write, I will take myself to a place, an adventure, an idea-mine that I couldn’t conceive fully just in my brain-space. Now that I’ve sort of learned that (I still resist inanity sometimes), I am more excited than ever to sit down at my desk and just write. It’s a great way to learn who you are deep down and to find out your capacity. (And what color is your dragon.)
Secondly, prompts can be especially helpful to dig up old memories. Many times, I have heard someone say – I just don’t remember anything from when I was a kid! Open-ended questions like ‘Tell me what it was like to be seven years old’ will only cue blinking eyes – and a blank page.
Without a structure or a spark, it’s hard to remember something in such a specific time. And who cares, anyways? This is not a court deposition and (hopefully) you didn’t murder anyone. Instead, prompts work best in a general way. In my very favorite book about writing – Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird – the author tells her class (and her readers) to think very small. She asks them to write about school lunches.
When I ask my boys what they remember about school lunches, they remind me of pots of pasta and sauce and cheese, tortilla pizzas made in the toaster oven or “snack-y” lunches with crackers and cheese and veggies – because we homeschooled them and they got a (almost always) homemade lunch everyday and ate it while they finished up their math homework. Or while discussing what color their dragons were.
School lunches do not conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings for me. School lunches may have been on the Top Ten List of Why I Wanted to Homeschool My Children in the first place.
So here for your entertainment is my take on What I Remember about School Lunches.
When I think back to school lunches, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell, the weird closed-in, lukewarm-food, old-lunchbox smell that inhabited my lunchbox whether there was food in it or not. When I squeeze my eyes shut, I remember a purple lunchbox with some past-cool or never-was-cool character on the front. Sometimes my mom used MacTac to cover up the picture, to try and “new-it-up” if it was a hand-me-down from one of my siblings. I don’t know who I wanted on my lunchbox instead, maybe Barbie or more honestly, the Muppets, but I never got them.
I probably had a lunchbox all through elementary school. We didn’t have lockers on the ground floor in Derwent school, so our lunchboxes would line the shelf above the coat hooks, our boots on the slanted shelf below them. The noon hour bell would semi-release us – we were free to go fetch our lunchboxes, but had to remain at our desks, eating our baloney sandwiches and pretending that eating with our enemies was normal, hiding any offensive item (like soup in a thermos) from public view and openly consuming chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to advertise that our mothers did indeed love us.
My favorite sandwich would have been a hot dog ensconced in white homemade bread that was slathered lightly with margarine and mustard, the whole thing wrapped, then twisted up, in wax paper. Baloney was a close second, the flatter version of a hot dog that it was.
There was always fruit. An apple, usually, which I never ate and never felt bad about leaving in my lunchbox for mom to shake her head about when I brought it home. She probably left it in the lunchbox, hopefully, unrealistically, for the next day. A banana, if not too bruised, was welcome. Sometimes there were plums, three of them, when in season, and I would eat those, especially happy if they were slightly green. Sometimes there was an orange, the Christmas, easy-peel kind, the kind we called by a politically incorrect name at the time. I would happily consume these, unless, alas, mom had mistakenly fallen for buying oranges with seeds. If I ingested the seed, unaware, I would reject the entire orange as soon as the seed hit my mouth, and it found the recesses of the garbage can outside in the school yard where we were allowed to finish our lunch once the first 15 minutes of the noon hour went by.
By the time I got to junior high, my mom capitulated to packing my lunch in brown paper lunch bags, with the unspoken stipulation that I was to return them for re-use until they were un-useable, unspoken because, well, Mom. While I hadn’t graduated to packing my own lunch (or ever did, even in high school), I started to like what mom packed for me a bit more, or she figured it out a bit better. Tomato sandwiches with mayo and salt and pepper, though soggy, were acceptable. So was Cheez Whiz. More sophisticated things arrived in the bags as I got older: granola bars and sometimes doled-out plastic bags of potato chips which hopefully would not be reduced to crumbs before I got to them at noon.
Okay. Your turn. What do you remember about school lunches?
We lived in the city so we had to go home for lunch. Our lunches did not vary from one week to the next. Every Monday was the same, as was every Tuesday, etc. Just last year, my sister mentioned bringing a friend home for lunch (which I would never have contemplated doing) and she something about having mac and cheese. Without thinking, I said ‘it must have been a Thursday’. After a surprised pause, we both burst into laughter.
When the boys were young, I always tried to make interesting, nutritional lunches but by late Junior high, they were often returning only partially eaten. So after that, they had to make their own though I could never understand how they could prefer their repetitive, boring lunches to my offerings.
As I was writing mine, I was wondering what my siblings would say about their lunches! Some of it was the same but there were definite differences with me being the last kid!