LOVE, LUNCH & MEATBALL GRINDERS
Whether it’s 1965 or 2015, packing lunch is still a place for parents to shine—or not.
W hen I was in elementary school, we began our day by wishing the teacher good morning, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and an off-key rendition of a patriotic song, which is to say this was the 1960s, when kids still hid under their desks to practice what to do when the atom bomb fell.
My Providence Street Grammar School was built in 1914. One classroom for each grade, as many as 40 kids in a class. The wood floors were polished and shiny, the chalk yellow, the chalkboard green. We did our work—and ate our lunches—at our old wooden desks.
Every night after supper, my mother made lunches for my brother and me. She used brown paper bags, the same kind we cut into book covers for our textbooks. By day, my Italian-American mother worked in a candy factory while my father kept America safe stationed in Cuba with the Navy. I’ve come to believe those school lunches were her only creative outlet. She didn’t have time to knit or sew—unless a button fell off our winter coats—or read. But she threw everything into those lunches. All of her energy and culinary desires, and all of the food in the house. Fried chicken—two pieces—bread and butter, Fritos, a Devil Dog, and half a pound of cherries; a meatball grinder wet with spaghetti sauce, several slices of Italian bread, two apples and a mini blueberry pie. You get the idea. These things were so enormous that I had to carry them not by the rolled-up top of the bag but like another geography book, large and heavy and unwieldy. I envied the kids walking down the street, jauntily swinging their metal Jetsons lunch boxes.The kids who opened those lunch boxes and pulled from them a Fluffernutter on white bread, an Oreo or two and a small apple. One girl had the most magical sandwich of all: one side white bread, the other side something called wheat bread, with a light smear of Miracle Whip and a thin slice of ham. That sandwich was
so delicate, so lovely, that it caused the first pangs of jealousy I ever felt. One day I screwed up enough courage to ask her if she’d like to trade. I spread my haul across the desktop.
“What’ve you got?” she asked, narrowing her eyes and bending her pixie-cut head to survey it. What did I have? Everything! But she only wrinkled her nose, turned her head and took a delicate bite of her exotic sandwich, leaving me to gnaw on chicken and hide cherry pits in my desk.
When I had children of my own, I made them thin cucumber slices, delicate turkey and cheese rolled and cut into pinwheels, an airy meringue. One day at pick-up, Sam’s kindergarten teacher grabbed my arm. “Sam’s lunches,” she began, and I beamed with pride. My kid had the perfect school lunches, and I knew it. “They’re measly!” she announced. “He needs more food. He’s asking everyone to share theirs with him. He’s hungry.” I wish I could say I changed my ways. But my youngest, Annabelle, still suffers from my desire to recreate the lunches I longed for. I remove her crusts and use cookie cutters to make her sandwiches into hearts and stars. I husk strawberries. And as I do, I remember my own brown bags groaning with food.
My mother built lunches the way some people build skyscrapers or monuments. They were her Taj Mahal, a testament to her love for me. And like all things that embarrass us when we are too young to understand them, I would give anything for just one more lunch made by my mother on a cool autumn evening—all of that glorious food jammed into a brown paper bag, made only for me.