What Goes Around, Comes Around or The Return of the Whole-Wheat Pita Pocket (Parts 1 and 2)

I am going to post the entire finished essay; if you already read Part 1, feel free to skim ahead, as I made few changes to the first half (yesterday's post).

Three times a week, to her great satisfaction, Lily stays at preschool until 3 and brings her lunch. All last year, once she picked up on the fact that her friend whose mother is a teacher at the school brought a lunch box each day, she begged for me a lunch box, not to mention the apparently tremendous privilege of being able to eat her lunch at school. No matter how many times I explained that children in the 2s-3s classes whose parents did not teach at the school were not actually allowed to stay for lunch, she was not appeased. So when she learned last summer that as a member of the 3s-4s lunching was, so to speak, on the menu, she started begging to stay every day.

We settled on three days, and although I had seen an adorable and practical canvas lunch sack in a catalog and planned to order it, the day we found ourselves in Target face-to-face with one shaped like a car was the day Lily got her first lunch box. The whole lunch box thing was pretty evocative for me. Although I feel this is akin to referring to a Victrola in casual conversation, I am old enough to have owned--and not ironically as an e-bay purchase--a metal lunch box with a plastic handle that opened with a little latch. One I remember well (I believe there were several over the years) featured a scene of Raggedy Ann and Andy. I suspect, knowing my mother, that this was not the cool lunch box to have, even in 1976. In fact, if I squint I can just barely see shadowy Wonder Woman and Scooby Doo versions parked across from me at the lunch table. But that's what I had, and although I don't remember swooning over it the way Lily does daily over her car, I liked it well enough.

When I was older, I brought my lunch in brown paper bags. Do kids do this anymore? I actually don't know. One year, someone gave me a fairly large supply of brown paper lunch bags for a birthday present that said "Amy" all over them. As was true of anything that had either my name or monogram on it, I LOVED these, remembering feeling devastated when the last one met its sad fate in the cafeteria trash can.

But the lunch boxes, or bags, are not the entree here. What I really remember, with specificity and emotional heft, are the lunches themselves. I also remember a very satisfying conversation as an adult with my cousin Inga, whose mother is my mother's younger sister and lunch-making soulmate, about how we would never fully recover from the unorthodox lunches foisted upon us in elementary school. Unfortunately I had a best friend in 6th grade named Emily Budd whose parents made the most perfect lunches imaginable from the perspective of, well, me. Her lunches had Cape Cod potato chips in little ziplock baggies, tuna salad or bologna sandwiches on Pepperidge Farm white bread, Milano cookies, an actual coke. My lunches featured whole-grains, fruits both fresh and dried, vaguely Middle Eastern ingredients such as hummus, hot, homemade soup in thermoses, cut-up vegetables, chunks of actual cheese (in lieu of coveted sliced American), and on and on.

Sixth grade, the year I fell in love with Emily Budd's lunches (and to feed the fire, her father made milkshakes in the blender when you slept over her house) was also the year my mother catered her cousin Beverly's wedding. This was disastrous for my already untradable lunches. For most of the year, wildly unacceptable leftovers emerged from the deep freezer my mother kept in our basement: miniature frozen quiches, chocolate cheesecakes with apricots, actual cream puffs. All thawed, or semi-thawed, by lunch, but who cared? Who wants to deconstruct a mini cream puff for an audience of bologna sandwich eating J Giles fans in Esprit sweatshirts? Not I, that was for sure.

That was the year, and I am ashamed to write this, that I threw entire lunches in the trash can: whole oranges, stuffed pita pockets, enough tiny cheesecakes in crimped little foil cups to feed another wedding party altogether, preferably one whose idea of culinary greatness was not the Mint Milano.

I found myself thinking about this late one afternoon last week as I opened Lily's lunch box when we got home from school. It was completely, suspiciously empty, but for the little spoon I'd included for the pear-flavored yogurt. "Wow, you ate everything," I marveled.

"No," she said, guilelessly. "I threw lots away. Right in the trash." My face actually felt hot. I had a veritable flashback of my 11-year-old self backing away from a garbage can in my middle school cafeteria to make a hook shot with a gorgeous whole orange a la Kareem Abdul Jabaar. I tried not to think of my mother, after a long day at work, selecting perfect oranges in the produce section of my hometown grocery store, packing my perfect lunches late at night complete with napkins and little handwritten notes.

"You did what?" I grimaced, breathing in hard, then exhaling slowly through pursed lips, which I have realized I do involuntarily when I am trying not to lose my temper.

"Threw it away," she said, again, oblivious to my reaction. "Now can we work on the round puzzle?" I told her we needed to have a little talk. I explained that throwing away perfectly good, untouched food was wasteful, and that if she didn't eat or even open an applesauce or a sandwich that she should keep it in her bag and bring it home again, that certainly someone here would eat it eventually. She nodded, somberly at first, then just to humor me, as I was going on a bit, I confess, about the environment and recycling and lord knows what else. I don't even remember.

And we went and worked on the round puzzle, and before too long it was bedtime, and a few hours later, when both girls had been asleep for a while it was time for me to make Lily's lunch. I took down the car-shaped lunch box and set it on the counter. I put dried apricots in a little bag. I cut some wedges of a really good--if not shrink-wrapped--cheese. I sliced all the way around a whole-wheat pita pocket and said a silent, belated thank-you to my mother.

And at 4, even though certain items apparently end up in the trash can, all in all Lily thinks her school lunches are pretty darn good. I know this because she tells me so. Occasionally she brings up the lunches brought to school by a little boy named Dylan, lunches that feature sandwiches made on bagels and granola bars in shiny wrappers, described with an almost wistful note in her voice. I close my eyes, try not to think about the future, when Dylan--or his sixth grade counterpart--will become the new Emily Budd.