Never to Taste Again

So I wrote this for a writing class. Our prompt was "food" and we could take it any way we wanted. I did this... 

           You’ve been gone all day. You’ve had school, various practices and all you want is a shower and…dinner. You’ve been looking forward to coming home all day to a hot, home-cooked meal. You finally get home. You’re anticipating this meal and have ideas about just what’s on the menu….and you find out it’s the only meal you absolutely do not want to have.

            In my family, we each have our own idea of what this meal is, that hated meal that just brings a long day down really quickly. Mine….is tuna casserole. This is the meal that at the end of a long day – or any day for that matter – that I absolutely do not under any circumstances want to see on the dinner table. I felt when I was growing up that we ate this almost every night. I don’t like it. I’ll eat it but you can bet that I will complain about it. I’m not a picky eater. I am very grateful for having been brought up in a home where there was always dinner on the table along with breakfast and a sack lunch for school. But under no circumstances would I ever voluntarily choose to eat tuna casserole.

Wavy noodles. Tuna. With a side of peas and bread and butter. The dinner I hate.

            Every time my family gets together, all seven of us (significant others included), love to get talk about these dinners…and the sack lunches, oh, the sack lunches we were plagued with growing up. Mom, bless her heart, tried to give us a variety, to make sure that someone got what they wanted at least once a week. The problem was that everyone had different tastes and favorites and accommodating five people on a budget presents a challenge.

            To this day, my brother refuses to eat cheese toasties (a.k.a. grilled cheeses) and tomato soup. My sister hates oatmeal with a passion. Each of these meals is a favorite of another sibling which is probably why growing up we felt like one’s favorites are being taken into consideration more than another.

            However, there is something we all agreed on were the sack lunches we took to school every day. Lunchtime always brought a mix of emotions for us kids. Recess obviously there were not problems there. Fun, friends, games, outside of the stuffy classroom where we could run around and play. This thirty minute reprieve from our education was a blessed break from the monotony. On the other hand, lunch itself brought a sense of dread and severe hunger pangs as if we hadn’t had a good breakfast four and a half hours earlier.

            We’d sit down talking to our best friends, strategically sitting at a point in the somewhat center of the table so that maybe, just maybe our crush of the moment would sit down next to us. We set down our lunchbox and sat…waiting for the moment to come, for the time to open the lid to that box that holds our lunch. And what does it hold? Something along the lines of…

            Bagel sandwiches.

            Or cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches.

            And inevitably, some mushy form of what used to be a banana, a plum, or a kiwi.

            I love my Mom, I really do. I appreciate all the effort she went to in order to teach us healthy eating habits and expanding our palates beyond what we already knew we liked. But it really says something when kids – who by nature eat strange combinations of food – will not trade for any of the contents of our lunchbox. Instead, kids would rather give a portion of their lunch to us so that they wouldn’t have to watch us starve…or watch us eat these concoctions. After a while, they picked up the pattern and just started handing over the rest of their chips, half a sandwich, a Hostess treat, if they were feeling extra generous.

            This is the story of my childhood through sack lunches and homemade dinners. Made with love and good intentions though they were these meals I hope to never taste again in my life.