oh sloppy joe
The subject of school lunches makes me hungry for the buttered potatoes Mrs. Tarr served us up in the first grade, in the basement cafeteria of Trinity Lutheran School. Mrs. Tarr was our lunch lady, and she won blue ribbons at the Illinois State Fair for her apple crisps that melted in your mouth and warmed your belly before going outside to fly high on the monkey bars, where the autumn chill swept through the buttons of your wool cardigan.
I think I only bought hot lunch on the days Mrs. Tarr made her amazing potatoes out of the giant bags of surplus spuds she had to work with. They were peeled and boiled and cut to perfection, each spoonful covered in the right amounts of butter and salt. She probably peeled a million pounds of potatoes during her career as lunch lady. God bless her. On the days I didn't take hot lunch, I had a nickel to buy a carton of milk, probably whole, to eat with my sack lunch.
Actually my sack lunch came in this.
"I think I love you. So what am I so afraid of? A love there is NO cure for!" That love would be David Cassidy. But I digress. This lunch box was just one part of a larger collection of Partridge Family items, including a navy blue dress with partridges hopping down the sleeves.
In the first grade, my mom was reading a lot of Adele Davis, author of "Let's Cook It Right!" She was a health nut who later died of cancer. Gone were the Zingers and Little Debbies (at least for that year) that would be found in my lunch. Instead I would find a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread, with natural greasy peanut butter that had to be stirred. There would be a Tiger's Milk bar. And roasted soybeans that my mom had lovingly put in an old aspirin or prescription pill bottle. Containers just the right size for doling out snacks. I'd like to see some brave moms do that today.
We moved to Raleigh, North Carolina when I was in the second grade, so that my dad could hold a year long vicarage at a Lutheran church there. I left the cozy environs of my private school for the larger, more sanitary confines of Douglas Elementary where I knew not one soul.
I remember sitting with my new lunch box all alone in a vast cafeteria, feeling the pull of loneliness and depression. My gray plastic lunch box was decorated with a row of pink flowers, tulips maybe, that blinked dismally at me while I slumped down and stared straight at my lunch box. I don't remember feeling more isolated than I did in that moment, or since. I'm sure I made a friend or two, but it was the grace of God that sent my family back to Springfield, Illinois for the rest of my elementary years, to my great joy.
In the beginning of my high school career, I attended the small Lutheran High School of Springfield as a freshman. We were located in a somewhat condemned, tall school building of red brick and uneven floors. Every lunch day, several students (the ones who could drive) and a few teachers would drive to a fast food place and bring lunch back for whoever had ordered it. We would hang out on the fire escapes overlooking the gravel parking lot where our parents' Chevy Impalas were parked, like young greasers and their girls, and eat our burgers and fries. Some of us would smoke. Some of us would make out. Some of us would just dream of making out. Someone would turn up their car radio loud enough for us all to hear the saving sounds of the Human League. I remember being wildly happy that I had a boyfriend for the first time. Life was good.
The spring of my freshman year my father announced that we were moving to Austin, Texas where he was going to create a Communications department for Concordia College. He showed us pictures of the hill country and the neighborhood he had picked out to for us to call home. This was before social media, of course, and email. These were actual printed photographs from an actual camera. And he had also picked the high school my brother Tim and I would attend.
"We were going to move to the hills of Austin and have you attend Westlake High School," he said. "But the kids seemed a little wild. So instead, we are moving to this nice ranch house in this nice suburban neighborhood where you will be bussed in to a school made up of kickers (you know them as cowboys) and other people who won't like you."
Actually he didn't say all of this, but that is what I heard. So it was that Sidney Lanier High School became my new finishing place of high school. And I had one friend. My brother Tim. Instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch, Tim thought we should walk a block down the street to a place simply named "The Meat Shop". You could buy raw meat displayed in a case, as well as jerky and a few things like honeybuns. It wasn't charming. Tim and I would buy honeybuns and sit on the curb in the bright noon sunlight and eat in silence. We both wanted to be home. This was not home. Not yet.
Later on, I would follow a friend to her nearby house and eat bologna sandwiches in almost silence. Then I found some fun friends who liked to go to the nearby Sonic and there was much laughter and camaraderie that eased the pain of school lunches I wanted to forget.
In college I don't remember eating lunch, but I do remember enjoying a bowl of Captain Crunch covered in chocolate milk from time to time in the sunny cafeteria of Concordia College. When I moved out of the dorms there was rarely little more than a few bananas and vodka (my roommate's vodka, just to be clear) in my apartment kitchen. As we lived across the street from the Red River Café, we just didn't see the use of keeping actual food in our fridge that would just spoil. Call it crazy, or call it complete freedom and abandonment from the oppressive lunchtimes that dotted my past.
I would be remiss though to say I do not know what love tastes like. It was without question Mrs. Tarr's buttered potatoes served up in a basement cafeteria on pale green plastic trays. Our lunch lady was small, shy, and always with a sweet smile on her face and a hairnet on her head. She loved her kids. We loved her. And school lunch doesn't get much better than that.
I think I only bought hot lunch on the days Mrs. Tarr made her amazing potatoes out of the giant bags of surplus spuds she had to work with. They were peeled and boiled and cut to perfection, each spoonful covered in the right amounts of butter and salt. She probably peeled a million pounds of potatoes during her career as lunch lady. God bless her. On the days I didn't take hot lunch, I had a nickel to buy a carton of milk, probably whole, to eat with my sack lunch.
Actually my sack lunch came in this.
"I think I love you. So what am I so afraid of? A love there is NO cure for!" That love would be David Cassidy. But I digress. This lunch box was just one part of a larger collection of Partridge Family items, including a navy blue dress with partridges hopping down the sleeves.
In the first grade, my mom was reading a lot of Adele Davis, author of "Let's Cook It Right!" She was a health nut who later died of cancer. Gone were the Zingers and Little Debbies (at least for that year) that would be found in my lunch. Instead I would find a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread, with natural greasy peanut butter that had to be stirred. There would be a Tiger's Milk bar. And roasted soybeans that my mom had lovingly put in an old aspirin or prescription pill bottle. Containers just the right size for doling out snacks. I'd like to see some brave moms do that today.
We moved to Raleigh, North Carolina when I was in the second grade, so that my dad could hold a year long vicarage at a Lutheran church there. I left the cozy environs of my private school for the larger, more sanitary confines of Douglas Elementary where I knew not one soul.
I remember sitting with my new lunch box all alone in a vast cafeteria, feeling the pull of loneliness and depression. My gray plastic lunch box was decorated with a row of pink flowers, tulips maybe, that blinked dismally at me while I slumped down and stared straight at my lunch box. I don't remember feeling more isolated than I did in that moment, or since. I'm sure I made a friend or two, but it was the grace of God that sent my family back to Springfield, Illinois for the rest of my elementary years, to my great joy.
In the beginning of my high school career, I attended the small Lutheran High School of Springfield as a freshman. We were located in a somewhat condemned, tall school building of red brick and uneven floors. Every lunch day, several students (the ones who could drive) and a few teachers would drive to a fast food place and bring lunch back for whoever had ordered it. We would hang out on the fire escapes overlooking the gravel parking lot where our parents' Chevy Impalas were parked, like young greasers and their girls, and eat our burgers and fries. Some of us would smoke. Some of us would make out. Some of us would just dream of making out. Someone would turn up their car radio loud enough for us all to hear the saving sounds of the Human League. I remember being wildly happy that I had a boyfriend for the first time. Life was good.
The spring of my freshman year my father announced that we were moving to Austin, Texas where he was going to create a Communications department for Concordia College. He showed us pictures of the hill country and the neighborhood he had picked out to for us to call home. This was before social media, of course, and email. These were actual printed photographs from an actual camera. And he had also picked the high school my brother Tim and I would attend.
"We were going to move to the hills of Austin and have you attend Westlake High School," he said. "But the kids seemed a little wild. So instead, we are moving to this nice ranch house in this nice suburban neighborhood where you will be bussed in to a school made up of kickers (you know them as cowboys) and other people who won't like you."
Actually he didn't say all of this, but that is what I heard. So it was that Sidney Lanier High School became my new finishing place of high school. And I had one friend. My brother Tim. Instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch, Tim thought we should walk a block down the street to a place simply named "The Meat Shop". You could buy raw meat displayed in a case, as well as jerky and a few things like honeybuns. It wasn't charming. Tim and I would buy honeybuns and sit on the curb in the bright noon sunlight and eat in silence. We both wanted to be home. This was not home. Not yet.
Later on, I would follow a friend to her nearby house and eat bologna sandwiches in almost silence. Then I found some fun friends who liked to go to the nearby Sonic and there was much laughter and camaraderie that eased the pain of school lunches I wanted to forget.
In college I don't remember eating lunch, but I do remember enjoying a bowl of Captain Crunch covered in chocolate milk from time to time in the sunny cafeteria of Concordia College. When I moved out of the dorms there was rarely little more than a few bananas and vodka (my roommate's vodka, just to be clear) in my apartment kitchen. As we lived across the street from the Red River Café, we just didn't see the use of keeping actual food in our fridge that would just spoil. Call it crazy, or call it complete freedom and abandonment from the oppressive lunchtimes that dotted my past.
I would be remiss though to say I do not know what love tastes like. It was without question Mrs. Tarr's buttered potatoes served up in a basement cafeteria on pale green plastic trays. Our lunch lady was small, shy, and always with a sweet smile on her face and a hairnet on her head. She loved her kids. We loved her. And school lunch doesn't get much better than that.