PBJ

I bring my lunch to work almost every day. Part of the reason is because it is much less expensive to make your own lunch than it is to buy it somewhere every day, but another part of it is that I don’t want to have to go out and get it all the time. However, there are some days, like this morning, that there are no leftovers and nothing to make a sandwich with. So on some of these days, I just make the old standby – peanut butter and jelly. I don’t want to have a PBJ sandwich every day, but every once in a while is alright with me. Actually, there are times in the winter on a Saturday afternoon that a toasted PBJ just hits the spot. The peanut butter a gooey, melty mess and the jelly nice and warm – yum!

There was a time when I was a kid that I had a PBJ sandwich almost every day for lunch. The only times I didn’t, I had a peanut butter and fluff sandwich (a fluffernutter). That’s how much I loved peanut butter. Even when I started elementary school (I didn’t go to kindergarten) I still had PBJs or fluffernutters for lunch because I brought my lunch to school most of the time the first few years. It wasn’t that the school lunches weren’t good; they were much better back then than they are now. They actually made the food in the school kitchen in those days.

To this day, I still vividly remember a day in second grade when I thought my lunch was ruined – and probably my life with it. We used to get to school a little early and hang around outside, playing with our friends. Sometimes we played with a football or played catch with a baseball. This particular day, there was one guy throwing a rubber ball off the brick wall of the school to a pack of us to see who could get “three outs” first and become the guy to do the throwing. It was intense and we were going after the ball like there were two outs in the ninth inning of the seventh game. Guys were getting run into, pushed out of the way and even knocked down. We were having a blast!

The bell rang, signaling the end of our fun and the start of classes. My teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, was an older, no-nonsense teacher, so when she came out to get us, we didn’t mess around. It was near the beginning of the year, but I already knew to do what she told you. I quickly went to pick up my jacket and my lunch and then I noticed it. My lunch was squashed. Someone had stepped on it and flattened out my brown bag lunch. I picked it up and slowly opened it to see a PBJ pancake. The tears started welling up in my eyes as I contemplated my poor, flat, mutilated PBJ sandwich. I held it out in front of me, finding Mrs. O’Reilly through my tears. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. I was in such a state of shock I couldn’t even speak.

She was looking at me, probably trying to figure out where I was bleeding. I just held my mangled lunch bag up to her. She looked at it, looked at me, and said in a slightly annoyed manner, “What’s the problem?” What’s the problem? WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?!?! Was she blind? I thought it was pretty obvious.

Between heaving breaths I managed to get out the horrible truth, “Someone stepped on my lunch!” Again, she looked at my lunch, looked at me, and in a noticeably more annoyed manner said “You can still eat it, it’s just a little flat!” She handed it back and I stared at her in disbelief. Couldn’t she see that my lunch was ruined? Heck, my whole day was ruined! Obviously she didn’t understand, because she started to push me toward the door and into the school. My classmates were all looking at me, wondering if I was OK, that I must have gotten hurt. But the only thing that was hurt right then was my feelings. I remember thinking something to the effect that my Mom would NEVER have done that.

Lunch time came and I took out what was once my wonderful PBJ sandwich, trying to conceal it from everyone else. I was embarrassed to have to eat such a pitiful sandwich, but eat it I did. I think I even fought back a few tears from my eyes at lunch, too. When it was done, Mrs. O’Reilly came by and asked me if my lunch was OK. I hated to admit it, but my sandwich tasted just fine, even if it was about an eighth of an inch thick. She smiled at me and patted me on the head the way adults do and I couldn’t help but smile back. That day I learned that Mrs. O’Reilly wasn’t such an old Meany after all, that she was actually pretty nice.

I also learned something else that day. Call it a life lesson, call it a metaphor for life. Sometimes your lunch is going to get stepped on and squished, and you have a choice to make: you can sit there and cry about it, or you can pick it up and eat it anyway. That day, for probably the first time in my life, with the help of a wise teacher, I chose to eat it anyway.

Poor Starving Kids

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

Sometimes you make a meal and it just doesn’t turn out how you thought it would. There have been times my wife and I made something that sounded great, but the outcome didn’t match the expectations. We made Thai food once and it was good, but we thought we’d change a few things and it would be better. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, nobody really liked it and we threw most of it away.

There are times my kids don’t really want what we’re having for dinner. When they were younger, they had to have at least a little of everything, otherwise they would have lived on Mac and Cheese, chicken nuggets, peanut butter sandwiches and Cheerios. We didn’t guilt them out over not eating a lot of the food; we just told them that there was no dessert if they didn’t eat the spoonful of whatever we put on their plates. Seriously, one spoonful of green beans is not a lot, especially if dessert is on the line. Now that they’re teenagers, if they don’t like what we’re having for dinner, they can make something for themselves. They’re fully capable of cooking for themselves without burning down the house.

When I was a kid, there were a few meals that I just didn’t like and did what I could to get out of eating. My all-time least favorite meal was liver and onions. I guess it was one of my father’s favorites, so even though we only had it every once in a while, it was too often. I’d complain that it was too dry and I couldn’t chew it. Mom would say to cut it into smaller pieces. I’d complain that I didn’t like the taste of it. Mom would say it tastes just like steak if you put ketchup on it. I’d complain that I didn’t like the way it looked, or smelled… or something. Mom would say to mix it in with my mashed potatoes. If any of us complained too long or too loud, she brought out the line that told us the complaining was over: “There are starving kids in Biafra who would love to have what you’re having!”

Biafra? I had never heard of Biafra, except from Mom. I used to think, “Wait a second, is that even a real place?” Usually, one of us would say, “There’s no such place as Bee-afra.” Sometimes, one of us would get bold and would even dare to say, “Then send it to them!” To which the reply was usually something to the effect of “Be quiet, be thankful you have food to eat and eat your supper.” And that was the end of that.

Much to my surprise, I found out years later that Biafra really did exist, at least for a little while. I also found out that a lot of people my age got the “There are starving people in…” line from their parents. For some, it was China, or Africa, or Cambodia. One or two even got Biafra, so my mother wasn’t alone. All of us had the same kind of (mostly) silent reaction, which was to send whatever meal it was to those people and let us have something we like.

As I got a little older, I often wondered what mothers in other countries told their kids. Did they have the same set of poor starving countries, or did they have a different set? Maybe kids in England heard about poor starving kids in India; kids in France heard about poor starving kids in Bangladesh; kids in Switzerland or Sweden heard about poor starving kids in Russia. Who knows, maybe kids in Russia heard about poor starving kids in America as a propaganda tool. Wherever you grew up, there were always poor starving kids somewhere else who would just love to eat what you were having for dinner – without complaining.

But I think that was a lie. Maybe we should have sent those meals to poorer countries and just watched what happened. I can just picture those poor kids having to eat liver and onions three or four times a week from all the American kids who didn’t like it, maybe with beets or brussel sprouts. I can just hear the kids saying, “NOT LIVER AND ONIONS AGAIN! I’m NOT eating that. It’s DISGUSTING! And these beets look like hardened BLOOD!” Their Mom would look at them with that hurt face and say, “There are nice people in America who sacrificed to send that to us. You’ll eat it and you’ll LIKE IT! Now put some ketchup on it, if you don’t like the taste. Then you’ll know what steak tastes like!”

If they had to choose between liver and onions or going to bed hungry, I’d put my money on them going to bed hungry. I would have if I had the choice, but I didn’t, and that’s probably why I still don’t eat liver, with or without onions. I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich. That way I could still have dessert.