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My wildly entertaining letters to my son and other American Soldiers suffering in Iraq and elsewhere...posted in no particular chronological order.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Presidents’ Day, 2006

Dear Army Guys,

Happy Presidents’ Day! I’m sure you guys are overwhelmed with parties and galas to attend in honor of the birth of dead presidents. Well, okay, maybe you’re not exactly overwhelmed. I myself have not been invited to a single Presidents’ Day soiree this year. I didn’t even get the day off work. What is the point of working at a school if you don’t get days off in recognition of worthy American legends? Lincoln and Washington don’t rate even an all-school assembly these days. Am I missing something here? Were Washington and Lincoln posthumously impeached and I just don’t know about it? Is America not America anymore and I didn’t get the memo?

Not only did I have to report to work as usual, but we also had a school lunch “special by request.” The “special by request” is a monthly event wherein we serve an entrée that’s not in the usual menu rotation. As the name implies, this is supposedly some fun-filled meal chosen on the basis of the children’s popular requests. I say “supposedly” because I have never heard even a single child beg for shredded pork BBQ, over-cooked macaroni with meat sauce, or breaded fish sticks- all three of which we have served this year as specials “by request.” The kids constantly beg for foot-long hot dogs and cheesy fries, but these entreaties fall on the unreceptive hearing aids of our leading lunch lady, Ethel, and, alas, go unrequited.

Instead Ethel dreams up inventive specials on her own recognizance guided by whatever food stuffs she happens to know are fossilizing in the freezers of the District 87 warehouse. Ann and I figure she’s trying to earn brownie points with the food service director by using up the ancient crap nobody else wants. Thus, our “special by request” today was the never-popular turkey & noodles.

On the face of it the idea of turkey & noodles sounds just fine; what could be more comforting than a steamy plate of creamy noodles cosseted by rich gravy abundant with roasted turkey? Mmmm, good! The problem is timing, namely Ethel’s. Ethel prefers to have the lunch entrée, whatever it may be, in the oven by 9:00 AM and on the steam table no later than 10:30. Turkey & noodles Ethel-style are not a pretty sight, especially by the time the fifth grade arrives for lunch at 12:50 PM. And, believe me, the fifth grade is a tough crowd to please under even the best of circumstances.

The children at Bent School are allowed to choose either the entrée or a sandwich or a disgustingly-sugared form of yogurt accompanied by cheese and crackers. I happen to be the luckless lunch lady whose job it is to make sandwiches on a daily basis, which is a time-consuming pain in the ass. I try to limit my daily sandwich output to less than fifty total sandwiches. That is why, on the days we offer our “special by request” meals, I am motivated to perform minor miracles of salesmanship in order to get the kids to take the entree. Fortunately, I happen to be blessed with an uncanny ability to get kids to accept unfamiliar foods they do not want to eat. I usually do this by various means of persuasion and/or outright misrepresentation of facts. (I just make stuff up.)

Today’s turkey & noodles entrée was a challenge, even for a master lunch lady such as me. I tried to formulate a plan, but sometimes these things just have to happen naturally. It is always important that the kids believe that I believe whatever crazy thing I’m telling them, and that requires a certain amount of flexibility. My original plan was to tell them that this was Martha Washington’s original turkey & noodle recipe. (I once got very good results claiming Britney Spears gave us a lasagna recipe.) My plan failed right off the bat when it became clear that the kindergarteners had never heard of Martha Washington and couldn’t care less. They took one look at the gooey mess of over-cooked gravy-soaked pasta on their plates and howled a collective, “Eeeww, yuck!” I had to come up with something much sexier than Martha Washington.

By sheer luck and that ethereal serendipity that sometimes infects even the most mundane of personal transactions; I hit upon the perfect foil. I started telling the kids that the glob of sticky, colorless gunk I was pushing was “comfort food,” and that we needed them to “just try it because we’re in a Comfort Food Contest and we need everybody to try it so we can maybe win!” This was easy with the remaining kindergarteners and the first grade. All I had to do was tell them it was a contest and they took the entree, most with no questions asked. Tyler J., a particularly annoying six-year-old brainiac, asked me if “they” would look in the garbage. I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, “You know, will they check the garbage cans?”
Seems Tyler wanted to know if we might get away with fooling the contest organizers by simply tossing our disgusting meal in the garbage and pretending everyone loved it. I told him that would be cheating and we don’t like to win by cheating, do we?
He seemed unimpressed by my ethical standards and demanded a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (That kid is on my lunch lady shit list from now on.)

Things were a bit trickier with the second graders because they wanted to know what the prize would be if we won. I told them, “We don’t know! Maybe it will be a new car!” Snotty little Demarco G. wanted to know what good a new car would do since he and his classmates cannot drive. I said it might actually be a bus. That still wasn’t good enough (the spoiled brat!) so I introduced the possibility of a motor boat and/or covered wagon with real- live oxen. SOLD!

Third grade was even more reluctant and required all the enthusiasm I could muster. I had to literally lean out the serving window and beg them to help us win this “very important, high-stakes contest.” They had no interest in helping us win a covered wagon, so I had to change the prize to a possible appearance on the Food Network. Third graders are all in favor of their lunch ladies being on television, especially when I told them it would be a wildly popular prime-time show “just like American Idol.”

Fourth graders, sadly, do not care if you win a contest or get to be on prime-time television. I switched tactics and told them we were part of a “top-secret government-funded scientific experiment.” If you wanted to be in the experiment you had to take the entrée. No sandwich eaters would be included, sorry, but it’s only for really smart people with, you know, “good taste.” I emphasized my “good taste” comment with finger-quotes, just to get the point across.

This gambit worked fairly well on the boys, but the girls just looked at me like I was… well… making stuff up. Fourth grade girls are a skeptical bunch and they often pretend to be suffering from anorexia. (This condition usually clears up as soon as we start selling ice cream and Cheetos™.) Fourth grade girls are viciously dysfunctional and should probably be institutionalized, if for no other reason than to protect them from each other.

The fifth grade is totally uncooperative and I hate those kids. I hope they all get beat up by the bigger kids at the junior high next year. If the fifth grade thinks I’m going to let them ride on my bus or appear on my Food Network show, they’ve got another think coming. Half of them are too fat to fit on a bus or squeeze into a TV screen anyhow, and that’s no joke. By the time the fifth grade had ransacked my stores of sandwiches I was tossing them slices of bread and packets of jelly and telling them to make their own [damn] sandwiches. “Here’s mud in your eye,” I said, flinging globs of greasy industrial peanut butter onto their lunch trays from a distance of four feet with my trusty 1 oz scoop. “Don’t come crying to me when this has to be scraped off the roof of your mouth with a painfully sharp stainless-steel dental instrument.”

I like to consider myself living proof that, despite government subsidies and welfare programs, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Much Love,
--An Army Mom

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