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.

unless cutting class to get stoned at the Cloisters instead of going back to class after lunch counts.

Oh, HELL yes! Please?

For Teppy:

---

"Monks?"

"Yep."

Post-lunch, and we're stuffed with falafel. The afternoon looms: geometry, civics, German. Aviva, rocker and Israeli exchange student, has Spanish, gym and trig. Yuck.

"They grow marijuana?"

"Yep."

We take the train to Ft. Tryon Park. Aviva's pop-eyed, a Sabra confronted by a medieval monastery in NYC. I know all the monks.

We slip into the Bonnefont Cloister gardens. Two of the brothers are passing the pipe.

Pot smoke wafts across the Hudson. Aviva and Brother Clement are debating judaism versus christianity, giggling a lot. I close my eyes, getting a contact high, digesting my falafel.

Beats the hell out of civics.

As somebody who got an "A" in civics...yeah.

I just sent the worst thing I've ever written since...hm. Since high school I think, our for beta.

I lost my mojo. If someone finds it, please send it as an attachment to my profile addie? It's creating panic.