sandwich

I've been spending the greater part of my first day of Labor Day weekend revamping my website. This is not because it needed it, necessarily. I rather liked the old design, which had the joint advantages of being extremely simple and requiring absolutely no maintenance. I felt towards it like a child does with his favorite Tinkertoy, which has survived sucklings and teethings, beatings against the sibling's head, and more than one traumatic trip down the alimentary canal. (Not necessarily in that order.) Redesigning my web page isn't prompted by dislike of the page design. Rather, it's an expression of my mid-life anxiety, a reaction to the tap-tap-tap of Death counting out a waltz on my shoulder with a bony forefinger.

It's possible that this experience of turning 30 has had a debilitating effect on my morale.

It will take me more than a few days to finish this redesign, as I fully expect to add graphics and style. This will be a little traumatic for you and me both. It'll be rather like watching your mother try out the Las Vegas swinger lifestyle after forty years of baking Betty Crocker. On the up side, this creative venting will give me a surrogate on which to focus my attention, a distraction from the itching awareness that I'm 30 years old, unmarried, childless, and will probably die shortly of some tragic accident involving a Swingline stapler, a water balloon, and an amorous Shih-Tzu. On the down side, the general lack of color means that the text is far more readable, which means you might actually start to notice the fact that I don't write so much as I do drivel on the keyboard.

In the clinical practice of journaling, I'm the Novocaine.

This afternoon, I picked up a copy of Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, another Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, and Pamela Ribon's first book, Why Girls are Weird at the bookstore down the street in Menlo Park, Kepler's. Kepler's is a respectable independent bookseller in a fairly upscale neighborhood, much frequented by Stanford students and oxymoronic well-to-do intellectuals. Despite the fact -- or maybe because of the fact -- that it's an independent, it manages to get some rather spectacular authors in for speaking engagements. This fall the lineup will include Garrison Keillor, Dave Barry, Margaret Albright, and Neal Stephenson. And if that's not enough, they cap it off with Dav Pilkey, creator of Captain Underpants!

Even for a huge evil conglomerate like Barnes & Nobles, this is a fantastic lineup. When you take into account that Kepler's is a good, slightly expensive bookstore that has yet to sacrifice goats to large publishing houses or pay tribute of virgin hamsters to literary agents, the issue becomes inexplicable.

My personal theory on this is that Kepler's is run by the Freemasons.

I started with Bird by Bird, partly because I'd heard so much about it, and partly because it happened to be at the top of the pile in my lap on the way home. One page in, I laughed. Four pages in, I was addicted. I bought the book, not because I thought it would help me with my writing -- because much as I cringe and apologize for it, if I were really honest with myself I'd admit I don't actually care -- but because I love to read good writing. I plaster my face to the window of the peep show, an upright, respectable housewife with a bewilderingly intolerable urge towards exhibitionism, and have an epiphany: so that's how it's done!

In one of the chapters, Lamott talks about giving her students an assignment to talk about school lunches. During the half-hour interlude, she sat down herself and started to write.

. . . The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like some people, were Okay, and some weren't. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple.

Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese.

I put down the book and felt oddly, malevolently triumphant. "I knew it," I was thinking to myself. "I knew there was a code."

School lunches were always a bit of a trial in my youth. At the time, Asians were not common in our small school district; those that sat in class with us had the advantage in that they were aggressively, proactively banana without any of the inhibitions or embarrassment that came with uncomfortable racial awarenesses. Banana -- yellow on the outside, white on the inside -- was for them not so much a habit as it was a state of being. Smaller children would ask them, "Are you Asian?" and they would answer, honestly bewildered, "No."

English was still my second language, and would remain stubbornly uncomfortable on my tongue for at least a couple years more. Social niceties were different as well; I had no context for relating to my peers, convinced as I was that they were laughing at me, sneering at me, or planning something behind my back. I was deeply suspicious of Caucasians and their rainbow of eye colors -- how could they see with those things? I felt superior to my classmates and ached to switch places with them at the same time, and while I didn't know that much about their home lives, I soon became aware that not every 6 year old at Somerset Elementary had the Japanese Consulate General over for dinner once a month, nor did they hold formal, full-dress tea ceremonies to honor the Emperor's birthday.

As a result, the awareness of difference between me and the majority Caucasians in my class was acute during my first few years of school. I fiercely envied my banana classmates during those years, watching them fit in better, talk better and be popular with our age group in a way I never could.

For one thing, I smelled different. Other girls smelled like Bounce or Barbie Fashion Perfume. I smelled like pickles. For one awful, endless year, I smelled like fish. Smelt, to be exact. Everything I wore was either two generations too old, two generations too big, or one generation too small. Plaids and polka-dots were an acceptable pattern combination in my family; when the fashion for little plastic jelly shoes came in, I came barefoot to school -- having hidden my shoes under the car on my way in -- and painted the lacy shoe patterns on my feet with permanent marker.

And then there were the lunches.

Good God, those lunches.

Other, more normal parents thought of lunches as events for nutrition or reward, packing a neat brown sack or -- oh, envy! -- giving their children $1.25 to pay for the cafeteria's offering of the day. My mother thought lunch bags an opportunity to express culinary creativity, and a spectacular chance to empty out the refrigerator.

Other children opened their bags to find treats. I opened mine to find lifelong psychological scars. There were the little dried fishes in the plastic baggies, hastily dumped out and scattered in the playground to the general mystification of the groundskeepers. There were the long strips of salted seaweed that started out as hard as concrete and had to be saliva-softened before they could be swallowed whole; teeth had no effect on them. There was the time we received a food dehydrator from some well-meaning acquaintance. For weeks Mom dehydrated everything too apathetic to run away: dried avocado, dried banana, dried beef, dried peaches, dried squid, all mixed together into an orderly little ziploc as a lunchtime treat.

In an odd way, those strange addendums to my meals gave me an ephemeral popularity. Classmates would gather at my table, the objects they wanted to trade momentarily forgotten in their hands while they watched the unveiling.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeew. What's that?"

"Squid."

"Eeeeeeeeeew. Yuhri's got squid." It is doubtful they knew what squid was. However, anything with that many tentacles had to be on the low end of the third-grade epicure's list of delights.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeew. What's that?"

"Pickled plums."

"Eeeeeeeeew. Yuhri's got pickled plums."

The pickled plums I actually liked, plump, salty, tongue-shriveling things that they were. Even today I love them, nauseating the Guy by popping them in one after another before diving for a vinegary-sweet kiss. Rolled out on the palm, they look like the heads of little old women, pink and rosy-cheeked and wrinkled just enough to be cute.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeew. What's that?"

"Graham crackers and cheese."

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeew. Yuhri's got graham crackers and cheese."

For all that, it was in the subject of sandwiches where Mom really shone. Mom didn't believe in trimming the crust off of bread; it was a waste of bread, and Mom didn't believe in waste. It never occurred to us to ask her. From the day we were born it was drummed into us: wasting food will cause your stomach to swell up like a balloon while demons eat your entrails from the inside out. Mom didn't only not trim the crusts off, she often used the last pieces of two different loaves of bread to make a single sandwich. One half would be gaunt and attenuated, sourdough crusted and flaky; the other half would be Wonder Bread, so squashy and transparent a wet sneeze would cause it to dissolve like tissue.

And the fillings! Here she outdid herself. Peanut butter and salmon. Strawberry jam, cream cheese, and tuna. Curry. Carrots, deep-fried breaded mashed potato balls and mayonnaise. Every lunch I would draw out my sandwich and excavate through the layers under my classmates' avid interest, discovering strata of dinners past between the bedrock of the bread.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeew. Yuhri's got a chicken and peanut butter sandwich."

No bologna for us, oh no. When Mom bought groceries, they had to be able to serve their turn in any, and sometimes every, meal of the day. I would watch enviously while my schoolmates drew out beautiful, geometric, perfect sandwiches sliced around paper-thin, geometric pieces of bologna and cheese even Hercule Poirot would approve of. My bag would produce a rice ball the size of my head, or a sandwich made of half a bagel and the bottom layer of a croissant.

It's funny how time will change memories of horror into sweet nostalgia. My sister and I occasionally reminisce over the shared experiences.

"Remember when . . . "

". . . and that time she got that smoker, and . . . "

". . . oh, and the jumbo tub of peanut butter someone gave her."

"I thought that was Goodwill."

". . . and she dehydrated it!"

We would have sacrificed our 6-year old souls for a Hostess Twinkie. A Ho-Ho. A piece of pizza or even something as tame as blueberries. Undehydrated, simple blueberries. My friend Lonnie would bounce his across the cafeteria table, singing the Smurf theme song, and midway through slam his fist down on the innocent fruit to squash them flat. His sound effects came complete with raspberry. By the end of lunch the table would be painted black with blueberry juice, stained with a hundred little Smurf corpses while I, jealous and deprived, nibbled gloomily away on the charred skin of a dinner eel from three nights past.

Nowadays I eat bread by the loaf, popping it into the toaster slice by slice to eat it plain -- a little bit of butter, nothing else -- for dinner. It's a simple, wholesome way to eat, if not necessarily healthy. It satisfies my craving for bread. Keeps me regular, that's what it does. A little sourdough, a little rye . . .

. . . but from time to time, there's that odd ping in my mind when I look in the refrigerator. A small tub of feta. A battered head of cabbage. Leftover curry. And some jam . . .

Anyone want lunch? I'm buying.