School Lunches

...taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows.  So: sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches.  Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, page 33.


I decided to write about school lunches today.  Here's what I wrote:

School Lunches

In high school, I took my lunch to school in a dented metal Wizard of Oz lunchbox.  I’d set the lunchbox in my lap and pull my lunch out, one item at a time.  I was the only person at my lunch table – the only one in my group of friends – who brought her lunch to school.  Everyone else paid to eat in the cafeteria.  My mom packed my lunch every morning – pimento cheese sandwich on wheat bread, a cup of applesauce, a slice of carrot cake, a napkin wrapped around a spoon.  My mom always drew an eyeball, a heart, and the letter “U” on the napkin.  I was always proud of that note, and I laid the napkin out flat so everyone at the table could see.  Looking back, I guess that wasn’t the nicest thing to do.  One guy’s parents were going through a divorce, another had been kicked out of his house and was living on a friend’s sofa, my best friend’s dad had just lost his job.

I would sometimes steal fries from the person sitting across from me.  It was a game I played with myself.  I would wait for the moment when the person was looking right at me, and I’d take their fries and they wouldn’t even notice.  It wasn’t that I wished my mom had packed fries in my lunchbox or that I was still hungry.  I just liked seeing what I could get away with while people were looking right at me.  They often noticed, but you’d be surprised at how many times they didn’t.

The few times someone asked why I didn’t eat the cafeteria food, I said it was healthier to eat a lunch from home.  I didn’t tell them, but it was also cheaper to eat a lunch from home.  They weren’t the kind of people who would know that, though.  They had summer homes and beautiful hair.  I bought my clothes at Wal-Mart and my lunch box was from a thrift store.  I didn’t want them to think I was rich – it’s not something I’ve ever pretended – but I didn’t want them to look from my pimento cheese sandwich to their fixed up hamburger and say “Want to split it?  I’m not that hungry anyway” or “Hey, I’ve got a few extra bucks left in my account this month, want anything?”  They were the kind of friends who would do that, and I was the kind of friend who didn’t want them to.  

Now, who knows if any of this is usable material?  There's no way to tell until you've got it all down, and then there might be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using.  Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, page 37.

What I've posted here is only my school lunch experience during high school - particularly 9th and 10th grades.  I could write pages and pages about school lunches - the warm, damp trays, the floppy pizza, the impossibly complicated milk cartons that left fuzz in your mouth, the boy with the mullet who got a bloody nose that dripped all in his creamed corn before he realized it.  I've never written about school lunches before, but it seems to be a fruitful place to go to for inspiration.