Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

Thursday, August 18, 2005


Dear Army Guys,


I have returned to the land of the living. I have emerged from my cocoon of late-summer entropy and I have begun acting like a productive citizen again.

On Monday I reported for lunch lady duty and unpacked and reorganized our school kitchen. I did this nearly single-handedly since Ann had a doctor’s appointment and Ethel, our boss, is a wizened old lady of indeterminate age. (We think she must be about 75.) Ethel is about 4 feet tall and looks almost exactly like the grandmother character on the 1970’s TV show “The Waltons.” No doubt you guys are mostly too young to have frittered away any prime time hours on Walton’s Mountain.
(G’night, Jim Bob! G’night, Mary Ellen! G’night, John Boy!)

Just think of a bespectacled woolly-headed white mouse scurrying around getting underfoot and occasionally waving a wooden spoon in somebody’s face. That’s Ethel. I have to physically restrain the old broad from lifting heavy boxes of frozen chicken nuggets into the freezers. I feel like I need to be everywhere at once to prevent her doing something that will result in a memorial service.

Over the past two years Ethel has lost all sense of reality. She thinks she’s as graceful as an athlete on steroids. On Monday I caught her trying to heft a 40lb case of canned peaches onto a shelf well above her tiny blue-permed head. I had to pry her arthritis-gnarled fingers off the thing and wrestle it away from her. I gave her an industrial food service lecture about the foolish logic of trying to lift things that exceed one’s own body weight. I invoked both common sense and physics. I reminded her that she is not going to win any lumberjack contests and nobody is liable to start calling her “Bruiser” anytime soon.

She just cackled at me and scampered off to do something else, like maybe lift fully-loaded railroad cafe cars overhead to inspect their undercarriages for illegal health department violations. Honest to god, that woman makes me a nervous wreck.

Today I attended a useless District 87 food service meeting, supposedly in preparation for school starting on Monday. Four score and seven Lunch Ladies gathered together to do stupid things like take a stupid personality test designed to make me look like a bossy know-it-all who can’t possibly play nice and work well with others.

I was identified by this test as an Introvert/Intuitive/Thinking/Judge. This, as opposed to Ann’s being an Extrovert/Processing/Perceiving/Compromiser.

On the next test I was exposed as a “Competitor,” which was represented by a cartoon shark. Ann was an “Avoider,” as expressed by a cute little ostrich character. Ethel refused to show us her results. I’ll bet hers was: Sociopath/Maniacal/Plotting/Butcher or something like that. I’ll bet she was a “Backstabber” as symbolized by a cartoon Chuckie doll.

The whole thing was a waste of time and tax dollars. Our fearless Food Service Director babbled on and on about “customer service” which, in our line of work, is a joke in itself. At the school where I work the “customers” are mostly juvenile delinquents under the age of 12.

I cannot for the life of me imagine a way to say,
“SIT DOWN, BE QUIET, AND IF YOU DON’T QUIT STICKING YOUR DIRTY FINGERS INTO OTHER KIDS’ MASHED POTATOES I’M COMING OVER THERE, DE’QUON!” and make it sound like,
“Thank you for dining with us! Y’all come back now!”

It’s a silly job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Much Love,
--An Army Mom