Thanks Sail, that's an excellent idea! Yay research!

Challenge #103 (box in the back of the closet) is now closed.

Challenge #104 is school lunches, which is a topic I'm unashamedly stealing from Anne Lamott.

This is revenge. This is revenge because I cannot read the words "school lunch" without this coming back to me. Apologies to those eating...no wait. Skip this if you are eating. -

I can still call up the smell of my elementary cafeteria. One that never changed, no matter the day's meal.

There were two trash buckets in front of the tray return window.

One was for paper, your milk cartons and napkins.

The other was for everything else.

Butteredcannedcorn-hamburgermacaronihelper-whiteroll-sausagecheesepizza- chocolatemilk-wholemilk-cheeseburger-fries-fruitcocktail-chickennuggets- cheezyenchiladas-spaghettiandmeatsauce-hotdog-grilledcheese-applesauce-salad

A slurping, sloshing stew in a 50 gallon bucket.

And the kindergarten monitor had to ask why I wasn't eating my lunch?

lunch

It was always the mashed potatos. You and me, baby, true starchy love.

I'd trade my hot dogs or square of pizza for the scoops of mashed potatos, so stiff and thick I piled them four scoops high.

Don't give my your "homestyle" mashed potatos with chunks of potato (unless there's lots of garlic and cheese in there too). Give me the industrial processed mashed potato scoop. Give me the gravy only if you've been very good.

ConnieNMashedPotato4Evah. Yeah.

I never knew how he did it. Maybe just his manner: all the good bits of Southern gentility, without the racism or pomposity. There were always at least four girls sitting with him at lunch, loudly razzing him, vying for his attention, or just soaking up his kindness. He didn't date much that year -- his sweetheart was a year older, already at college. But oh, how they loved him. And for one sweet, blessed year, I sat with them, trying like hell not to make a fool of myself as I learned what it was to be a gentleman.

Lovely, Karl. You certainly learned that lesson well.

And in a complete change of mood, I offer:

The lunchroom always had that tang of bad tomato soup cooked too long in aluminum vats, that unmistakeable composite of acids sharp enough to strip tender nosehairs and turn the stomach.

Mother didn't waste money on metal or plastic lunchboxes. Inside a brown paper bag soft and wrinkled with reuse was one slice of baloney on white bread with yellow mustard, and a peeled hard-boiled egg, the slick white greyed by hours confined in an aluminum tea ball, "to keep it from getting squashed". And there was usually a nickel in my coat pocket for a half-pint of milk.

There’s a tradition in my family, handed down from my grandmother to my mother to me. I’ll pass it along to my kids some day. About sixth grade, it started to get embarrassing when my friend saw, but it always made me smile inside. What you do is, in the morning when you’re making lunch, you write a note on the banana. You don’t need a pen; your fingernail works just fine to barely scrape the banana peel. It doesn’t show up right away, but by lunchtime, the broken skin has browned, and the banana says “XOXO” or “LOVE YOU.”

Damn, I have no memories of, or traditions associated with, school lunches, unless cutting class to get stoned at the Cloisters instead of going back to class after lunch counts.

I'm-a sit back and enjoy everyone else's this week. It's like a different language.

Sometimes it's not so much the lunch you remember as the container...

There are some people who, the instant you meet them, you just know are going to be your best friend. You were one of those people. We were enjoying comfortable silences bare minutes after meeting, and before long were completing each other's sentences, much to the amusement of the mutual friend who had just introduced us.

I think, though, that the thing that convinced me we were sisters separated by birth is that we both, half a continent away from each other and completely unware of the other's existence, defied first grade gender expectations by proudly toting Evel Knievel lunchboxes.

I'm thinking this is...not that great. But what the hell...
My mom was sort of a hippie so my lunches were weird to the other kids. Generally just in a plain bag, although one year there was a Muppet lunchbox tooApparently in grade school only freaks eat fruit without sugar on it, so I was a freak among freaks. I should have prepared...this was going to happen a lot. My best friend in the world(so much easier to say when you’re nine) had a mom that was, like, a hardcore hippie. She rode her bike to help out at school and they had a nude drawing in their house.She also cursed quite a lot, and she never gave my friend anything that even looked like junk in her lunch. I suppose I could’ve gotten some of the weird off of me by giving it to her, but our moms were friends and I suppose what my mom said was true: Things were different in New York, where my friend’s mom was from.