Short story

10,800 Sandwiches

I grew up privileged, in many ways, and not the least being of the gastronomic sort. Although we always had beautiful home cooked meals, what I’m talking about here is the sack lunch. Every Monday, my father would bake bread that would provide enough mass for a week’s worth of sandwiches for six kids and often one foreign exchange student. It was a darker rye bread but somewhat light with a consistency that varied not a percentage point due to the habitually disciplined hands of the baker. The dough was spun on a bed of flour, folded over and then punched by those rather large hands at exactly the same rate and frequency as done the previous Monday. To accompany these peanut butter and honey, tuna, salami or BLT masterpieces was a small bag of potato or corn chips, a piece of fruit or carrots or celery and a dessert which was usually some kind of amazing 7 layer pile of chocolate pulled from our oven by my mother’s hands. This collection of the various food groups was then transferred into one of those classic brown bags that still, to this day, hold that Dorothy Lange inspired Depression design, then chucked into my backpack and portaged across frozen railroad tracks, past Bolson’s Feeds and down to the middle school and eventually landing in my locker. We were strongly encouraged to make Monday’s bag last all the way through Friday, hence, I was always known as the kid with the folded up brown bag in his back pocket. This was done, perhaps, in a mocking manner but except for the offer of pizza on Friday’s lunch menu, that sack lunch was secretly the envy of all. That goes for the staff as well.

* Just to make a clarification, early in my educational career, there were plenty of times where the sack lunch was replaced by the metal lunch “box” and although the perishables inside remained constant, the box evolved depending on which cartoons I was watching. When I was a second grader, my “Fat Albert” lunch box ranked up there as an item I would have grabbed in the event of a fire.

So this lunch manufacturing business went on for years and years with six kids, one of which was eating two sandwiches because of growth spurting issues, plus the random foreign exchange student to feed. So that is 8 sandwiches a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year for 15 years or so. Roughly. I’m coming up with 21,600 sandwiches. Oh boy. I had no idea. Let’s go extremely conservative and half that. 10,800 sandwiches. I’m still shocked. Anyway, the point is that my folks were pumping those sack lunches out at an alarming rate and we were eating them just as quickly, almost as if our lives depended on it. And if the weekend had been an extraordinarily busy one and my folks had not the time to address the sack lunch meal train before we were all off to school, my father would hand deliver them to our lockers later on that morning while we were sweating out some spelling test or staring out the window inspecting freedom. Let me reiterate. Our lunches were hand delivered. We may not have had the summer place in the Hamptons or the chateau near Mont Blanc, but we were privileged... in a small town Iowan kind of way.

My father always wore these moccasin-type shoes around the house in the mornings during the winter months and once, when there wasn’t enough time to assemble the sack lunches before our tertiary exodus, he delivered my brown bag via the ancient, rather icy, stone steps of the middle school. The conditions were such that his left foot was propelled forward and rammed into the rise of the step. The upshot was a broken big toe. Split bone syndrome. This was when I first learned that sometimes even the most skilled surgeon can and will do nothing for a broken toe.

There were a few odd days here and there, where I would get my little ticket punched by an obese woman in a hair net and actually purchase something beyond milk and that was almost always for a slice of pizza on Fridays. When I recall those slices, I now realize that they were a very, very, very distant relative of what I now know as pizza. Dough the color of alabaster, red sauce out of a can and cheese so processed that I’m still working on digesting it and that was the best meal out of the week. Even then, I knew I was living the high life with my brown sack of homespun culinary artifacts. Those school lunches were the beginning of a horrible trend here in the US, mainly dictated by profitability, shipping and shallow thought and if you haven’t read Michael Pollen’s “In Defence of Food”, he will explain the course of events for you that were festering in the early 70’s, the ones that have helped foster and fund a very large belt industry.

One day in my fourth grade homeroom class where all subjects were, in the least, addressed if not taught, Mrs. Hauck broke out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, dropped the needle in the groove and immediately blew my mind wide open. I don’t think she or her beehive were necessarily that into the album or the Beatles for that matter, or had any idea what that weird sounding instrument was on “Within you Without you” but I was forever changed despite having absolutely no clue what "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was longhand for. All I knew was that those boys could write melodies that would go on for more than 4 bars and still hold my interest. Although I could barely get my head around the finale of “A Day in the Life”, I had been to England the summer before and tried to understand what the hell the Cockney milkman outside the home of our family friend was saying. This constituted a certain feeling of kinship with John, George, Ringo and Paul that I seemed to have lost upon entering adulthood.

Perhaps it was Harvey, Mrs. Hauck’s husband, who was a bit more clued in to the times and suggested that she introduce The Beatles in her music course curriculum to get the synapses firing even faster within our growing brains. I knew Harvey better than I knew Mrs. Hauck yet I spent less time with him. I can’t even recall Mrs. Hauck’s first name but Harvey, who happened to be the head school janitor, would visit me every day…during lunch. I don’t remember exactly the day of our first hang out session but I know what kept him coming back: my sack lunch. Every day at noon, I would sit down on those long collapsible tables with a few of my buddies and try and figure out what the mystery painting was in Mrs. Badorf’s art class because if you guessed it right, you would win one of those cool art store erasers. I remember correctly guessing Winslow Homer’s “The Gulf Stream” and thinking how cool under pressure that black slave was, even though he was pretty screwed with all that blood in the water and those hungry sharks, a busted up boat and bad weather just beyond his lean, black shoulders. So we would all dive into our lunches, most eating crap food off plastic trays but a few of us out of our brown bags. I always ate my lunch in the same order: sandwich, chips, fruit, and lastly dessert. And like clockwork, Harvey Hauck would appear out of thin air, sitting next to me in his khaki, industrial janitorial outfit with his bushy, black moustache, big nose and Buddy Holly glasses. He was one of those guys who looked like he was always wearing those gag glasses/nose/moustache get-ups that one can find at the joke shop. But he was the real McCoy and the thing that always followed his sudden appearance, was a smile on my face. Initially, there were no words and he would ‘fake distract me’ with his eyes and I would ‘fake look the other way’ while he slowly slid his hand across the table and into my little bag of chips. He would grab just one and quickly pop it into his mouth, slowly moving his jaw and crunch to a 3/4 waltz time signature which I could have easily hummed “She’s Leaving Home” to. He would then ask how life as a 7 year old was and I would try and say something funny before he would claim to have some work to do, gently pat me on the head and be gone. This was nearly an everyday occurrence and one that might never have happened, or at least with much less poetry, had it not been for my little sack lunch, the one always packed with a spare chip.