LUNCH HOUR

Over fifty years ago I sat at a long cafeteria table in an old rickety gym and pulled cream cheese sandwiches out of my bag lunch. My mother carefully cut fresh chives every morning to mix with the cream cheese. She packed potato chips separately so I could add them to the sandwich right at the lunch table. That way they would stay crispy “until the last minute.” My mother was traumatized about the junior high lunch room and thought her careful details would help me “feel at home.” Before junior high I walked two long blocks with sparse sidewalks four times a day. Lunch was almost always thick homemade soup my dad, who also came home for lunch, ate with a tablespoon.

The summer before junior high, the mothers in our neighborhood were busy chattering on the telephone or in clusters on the driveway. All were visibly worried about the “yelling, cussing gym teacher” who supervised the lunchroom and the roaming ninth grade “hoods” who snuck out to smoke at the corner hangout.

My mother need not have worried. I loved the open lunch hour. I could eat with my friends, we had time to talk and we could walk to the Dairy Queen for dessert! There also was a connection neither I , nor my mother, had anticipated, a couple of times I abandon my friends, cream cheese sandwiches and Dairy Queen dessert to walk to my grandmother’s apartment.

Giving up even one lunch hour with my friends seemed hard at the time and I know Grandma was more thrilled than I. The lunches were homemade: carefully prepared and well timed so that we would have moments to eat and talk and I could still make it back to school before the fourth hour tardy bell. I remember pink Depression glass dessert dishes filled with tapioca pudding. I remember cloth napkins and good china and BLT sandwiches with local farm bacon and fresh Michigan tomatoes. But most of all I remember my Grandma’s questions, “Could I count the Louisa May Alcott books she had given me and I had devoured as book reports?” “Are you learning to match plaids in your home ec class?” “Do you have time to redo your pony tail after gym class?” Deeply interested in everything I was doing, I didn’t need to hear how much she loved me, I could feel it. Most of the details of the conversations in the lunchroom are long gone, but the conversations around Grandma’s maple table squeezed into her tiny apartment linger.

Yesterday I picked up my granddaughter, Claire, for lunch at her middle school. She has been ordering cafeteria lunches since first grade, she can’t leave the lunchroom without a pass, and last year she had an assigned seat. Claire met me in the school office with her pass. We drove to a local crepe restaurant of her choosing. She ordered for us. We shared a savory, then sweet, crepe. I peppered her with questions, “Was the second vampire book as good as the first?” “Had she convinced her Studio Production teacher to let her stay in the class for another ten weeks?” “Did she have time to dry her hair after swimming?” I savored every minute: the crepes, her words, her interest, and especially, her presence.

There has been amazing change in lunch hours and twelve year old lives in fifty years but a grandmother’s deep and abiding love for her granddaughter has not altered or wavered.