lunchtime

My daughter Megan has children starting school on Monday and has been trying to figure out the best things to pack in their lunches. Variety or consistency? This triggered one of my earliest childhood memories - from maybe two or three years old - are of getting up early in the morning while it was dark, and the rest of the house was asleep, and joining my mother in the kitchen where she was preparing breakfast and making lunches before going off to work in downtown DC. I remember her spreading a clean dishtowel on the tiled counter, and sitting me up there to watch as she made rows of sandwiches and wrapped them in wax paper - carefully, neatly, with nicely pointed folds. Then wrote names on a stack of brown paper sandwich bags in big letters with a giant-sized black crayon (possibly the first words I learned to read) and bagged up four or five lunches and set them in a row on the closed keyboard of the piano by the front door. Each lunch had two sandwiches (one sweet like PBJ and one "meat" that was baloney, deviled ham, chopped egg, etc.) and usually a piece of fruit and a cookie. After that she would go and wake the rest of my sibs.

I was the youngest of six and my oldest sister graduated from high school the year before I entered kindergarten. I can still see those bags sitting on the piano lid and people grabbing them up as they went through the front door. Since she was still making lunches for me when my brother Michael and I were in junior high, I realize now that Mother must have done this five mornings a week for well over ten years. I think that counts as quality time, don't you?