Lunch

I first published this in my Racine Journal Times weekly column on January 17, 2003, which is, whoa, 8506 lunches ago. 

Are there sweeter words in the English language than, "Hey, time for lunch!"? 

Lunch is low-rent heaven. It puts everything you are supposed to do on hold while you go off to eat pretty good food in the company of good enough people. You don't get Eternal Release, but then did you really want THAT much of a break?                 

Visualize the comfortable bustle of the noon-time crowd at your favorite local restaurant. Hear the reassuring sound of coffee pots sliding on and off their warmers, the hiss and splash of new coffee dripping into a glass carafe.

Servers greet familiar patrons, take orders, and call out instructions to the kitchen. Friends and co-workers rearrange chairs to fit whoever shows up with the squawk of chair legs being dragged across the floor.

Recall the aromas of institutional lunches. Remember the perfume of pizza floating out of the high school cafeteria while you sat in geometry class? You were yearning with all your soul for the buzzer that would release you to food and friends? (Can you hear Patsy Cline singing, ‘Please Release Me, Let Me Go’?) 

Have you smelled mac and cheese at a grammar school? Mystery meat and mashed potatoes at the nursing home? Shepherd's Pie in the dorm cafeteria? (Rumor was shepherd’s pie was made from ground shepherds.) None of these scents are Chanel yet when you are bored and hungry they evoke a powerhouse of human longing.

Some of us eat alone. If I’m working at home I carry a PB&J to the living room where I collapse sideways in the big chair, my legs dangling over its overstuffed arm. My mind wanders as I chew while staring out the window at tree branches and at flapping crows. On rare occasions a coyote pads down our quiet street and I jump from my slump to admire her chutzpah. Do coyotes have chutzpaw? 

Lunch is our break from everyone else's agendas. Click that save button, grab your brown bag, run an errand for your family while you listen to your favorite radio station in the car. It isn't a week in Hawaii -- but you don't give it up easily, do you? How irritated do you become when a phone call steals five minutes from your lunch hour? That's the clue as to how much we need and crave this little downtime in our day. 

Breakfast is too early, just fuel the body and go. Dinner is the meal that reflects values, hopes, and pretensions. We set the table, eat with family, share our days while eating things we've spent time and imagination cooking or at least picking up from the drive thru. 

But lunch is the meal for here and now. It's seldom about who we want to be or how we want to impress. Very few of us love lunches accompanied by cloth napkins, power suits, or foods we can't spell. That's not lunch, that's just more workday masquerading as a break. 

Lunch is the meal where we are most free from our families. First Grade liberates us. We taste the sweetness of a meal where no one cares if we eat that icky bologna sandwich, if we trade homemade carob granola bars for the some other kid's Twinkies. Lunch is where we practice being ourselves and not our family's kid. 

We take this odd hour of personal freedom with us into our adult lives. Our spouses aren't there to see what we're eating and whom we're eating it with. Our kids don't know that we are talking about them. The pillars of our churches don't know we are flirting with co-workers. Our Book Club doesn't know we are parked in a fast food parking lot slurping drive-thru diet cola while race-reading a book from the genre euphemistically called "popular fiction." 

My son told me years later that when he was in middle school, he and one of his friends would sometimes go to the store across the street from their school to buy cans of frosting for lunch. You know, that’s so insane it makes me laugh - but it is also lunch in a nutshell. When it's your dollar, your hour, and your friend you have found a space in your day that belongs solely to you.    

It's not just kids who indulge in insane food. My husband worked years ago with a guy who regularly ate two double-bacon-cheeseburgers for lunch. I checked the nutrition charts -- that's more grams of fat than adults are supposed to eat in a week. We kidded he could add variety to his life by eating Chapstick on rye. 

Lunch is a stretch of time that belongs to us. It's food we don't mind eating. It's conversation with people who know our work worlds. For kids, it's a time to practice freedom. For adults, it's when, like the unworried kid we once were, we are allowed to accomplish nothing much. 

Lunch time is temporary freedom from schemes and dreams in order to live, however foolishly, in the here and now.