We all have that vivid memory of sitting down at that endlessly long, thin wood table in the cafeteria. Surrounded by your peers, you pull out your lunch box and compare its contents with those around you. My lunch box happened to be the same insulated cooler that all the other girls carried -- each in various hues of pastel.
One of the easiest ways to fit in in Mrs. Clyne's second grade class came in the form of having the same food storage unit as the rest of the kids. It didn't promise to make you the most popular, but it gave you a better rank -- status enough to sit in the middle, flanking the future JV quarterback and his Little Mites girlfriend. This was the nucleus of the lunch table and that Igloo cooler kept you magnetically pulled in to the center, rather than wedged in on the outskirst. Kids in that caste quietly sulked over their styrofoam lunch trays and luke-warm milk cartons. They yearned for a turquoise lunch box like mine, wished they could open it to find a feast of treats like Tiffany and Ashley had. They too wanted to be included in this twisted, pre-pubescent Mean Girls-squad that I painstakingly made sure to be a part of.
I dreaded the days when Mom was too busy to pack my lunch or to make a run to the grocery to stock up on bologna and granola bars. I can't think of anything I dreaded more than having to cash in those yellow perforated slips of paper in exchange for whatever the hair-netted fat lady with warts plopped onto your waiting vessle. Who knew humiliation could come in the form of foldable meal tickets -- food stamps with training wheels.
My best friend, Beth, had a mom who must have majored in the art of packing school lunches. Every single day, Beth would pull out what seemed to be the model of elementary dining excellence. Like Five-gold-Star sticker masterpieces, they were always perfect, indulgent yet satisfying to the pickiest of eaters. They were mini four course meals, ziplocked and organized neatly in her pink Igloo cooler, under the lid that screamed "BETH'S LUNCH" with starbursts of purple and yellow paint pen. Sometimes she got a note reminding her how much she was loved (as if the extra candy didn't already say so.) But what really caught my attention was the constant presence of two Funfetti cupcakes. They were quite the confectionary specimens -- Always perfectly iced, equal in size and sprinkles. Had they been left to survive the war vessel that was my lunch box, through the terrains of tree climbing before the bus came to pick me up, they would never have made it to the cafeteria. But Beth's vanilla-frosted dreams arrived first-class priority to the cafeteria. They rode in more style than most of the kids did -- car-pooled door-to-school door every morning in a luxury Cadillac, while the rest of us shared the tight brown pleather and obnnoxious fumes of the Big Cheese.
Her food may never have been spoiled like mine sometimes was (I once had to be sent to the nurses office when, after biting into the Re-liv granola bar my mother packed, it turned out to be infested with small white insects) but spoiled food and spoiled people are two totally different dilemmas, one being quite incurable. And, in that case, I think I'll take a dose of the nurses' Donald Duck Orange Juice -- apparently the acid kills bugs as well as it kills cafeteria humiliation.
