The aroma of the cafeteria was meaty and sweet, yet with a base of disinfectant that nearly slapped me across the face as I shuffled in with my second-grade classmates. It was the end of my first week in this new school after having just moved to Orlando from Tampa when my father left his job at Pioneer to take a new sales position at Siliconix in 1984. I was seven years old, and food was quickly becoming a problem as the move across Florida was a little traumatic for me and it was the quickest way to make myself feel good when I missed all of my friends or all of the stuff I missed about our previous house and neighborhood. During the first day in our new house, with all of the commotion of the movers and unpacking boxes, our family cat Smokey, a large Russian Blue furball that doubled as my favorite stuffed animal in bed when I was sick, got out into the new neighborhood and disappeared. I was distraught and crying and the way my mother calmed me was by teaching me how to pop a bag of popcorn in our brand-new microwave oven, a convenience we didn’t have in our last house. Shoveling fistfuls of the hot, buttery kernels into my mouth would become my reward whenever I started to feel morose, and I quickly became a very chubby kid.
Me in 1985 already developing a wicked set of man-tits
The line into the cafeteria was divided in two, one for the kids who were buying their lunch and one for those that brought their own from home. Clinging to my Return of the Jedi, metal lunchbox, I was in the line with the kids looking for tables with friendly faces where we could plop ourselves down, except I had no idea where to sit because I hadn’t really made any friends. At the ripe old age of seven I was already starting to feel like an outcast when in a group of my peers. Since the move from Tampa, I had left behind two of my best friends that I’d known for longer than I could remember, and the loneliness was dragging me down. So, I found a bench seat at one of the long tables close to a large window that was open to the kitchen. The smell of sloppy Joes and canned vegetables would waft over to my able in moist, warm waves that were turning my stomach.
Our class was divided into four pods of about 15 kids each that would trade off subjects throughout the day in in a giant room divided by a series of four huge cubicle walls. The only time we were all together was during our lunch period, and for that we all filed neatly in two rows out of our room through a narrow floor to ceiling carpeted hallway into the large circular sunken library area that doubled as the hub of Sterling Park Elementary. The school was basically laid out like a large wagon wheel with the library serving as the hub, and eight spokes that led to six large classroom areas (housing Kindergarten through Fifth grades), a front section with a few offices and the school store, and the cafeteria. All of the walls on the inner hub doubled as shelving for books, and the library desk was located in the center of the sunken floor. When it was near, during or just after lunchtime you could smell that day’s offerings throughout the whole building because of the wagon wheel design to the building.
As I sat alone in the lunchroom, I wondered what I was going to find in my lunchbox. What I really wanted was one of my mother’s salami and mustard sandwiches and maybe some Fritos. But from the heft of the box and the metallic rattling inside, I kind of already knew what awaited me. Pulling the white plastic tab back a bit, I opened the lid, which featured a heroic painting of Luke Skywalker whipping out his elegant blaster to take aim at Jabba the Hutt, and inside the box was a red plastic thermos with a picture of Wicket the Ewok on the front, a small metal spoon with a flowery design engraved on the handle and an orange flavored Capri-Sun juice pouch. I sighed as I pulled out my thermos and spoon and twisted off the white plastic cap that doubled as a cup, and then bracing myself, I opened the interior cap with the built-in yellow straw. What was it going to be today, Mom, Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin Burger or Chef Boyardee Mini Raviolis? Looking around the cafeteria I saw plenty of other kids tucking into their lunchboxes or brown paper sacks, sandwiches or bags of chips in hand. But no one else had a thermos full of lukewarm soup or pasta. I was the only soup kid.
I hated soup lunch days, especially when my mom filled my thermos with something pungent like Chunky Sirloin Burger or vegetable minestrone. Not only was it gross to scoop out the slightly congealed soup with a spoon that I’d have to clean off and remember not to leave at school, but there isn’t a kid in this world that would ever be willing to trade their vanilla frosted Zingers or mini bag of Ruffles chips for a thermos cap/cup full of soup. I hated being a soup kid, at least at school. At home I loved it when my mother made me bowls of Cream of Mushroom or Beef Noodle Soup. But at home none of the other kids would see me slurping from the side of the bowl or watch me fishing around for that one glop of delicious salty, creamy condensed cream of mushroom that didn’t melt away in the added warm milk. No one saw me scraping the edges of the top of the Pfaltzgraff Yorktowne bowls for the dried, gummy soup residue so that I could get every last bit of luscious flavor from my lunch or dinner.
Not only had I developed a nasty habit of eating to feel good, but my issues with food ran deeper in that I’d also had a bad experience eating dinner at a friend’s house in our old neighborhood the year before. My family lived in a quaint slice of suburbia in Tampa, Florida and my best friend was a Puerto Rician kid from down the street named Anthony. I remember that his parents were a little on the eccentric side, in fact my dad always used to joke about the fact that Anthony’s father caught and caged a peacock he found on the golf course that butted up to the back of his property. They kept the bird in their garage and always had the door rolled up so they could display it to the neighborhood as a sort of status symbol. I actually thought it was pretty cool and totally identified with how his dad must have felt when he caught it. I myself spent an inordinate amount of time as a kid searching that golf course for wildlife and was always coming home with a mini travel cooler filled with creek shrimp, crawfish, turtles and frogs. At some point during that summer of 1983, Anthony, his little sister and I ventured out onto the gold course green that was directly beside his house. There was a short bridge that connected a cart path leading around the green over a small creek that ran alongside it, and underneath where the earth had eroded away there was a decent amount of natural red clay soil exposed. We dug up a couple buckets full of clay with the idea of making some small pottery that we could sell to the neighborhood. We spent the afternoon shaping crude clay ashtrays and a couple sad little clay ducks before leaving them in his driveway to bake under the scorching Florida sun.
Me (left in the sweet Empire Strikes Back shirt)) and Anthony in my driveway sometime in 1983
Anthony’s mom came out and saw us completely filthy; arms and clothes caked in orange clay mud, and immediately pulled us into the house to get washed up. I remember being very concerned about leaving my handiwork outside and unsupervised where anyone could swipe it and told her as much. Though I don’t remember her exact reaction, I’m pretty sure she had a laugh at that, and she ended up buying my duck and ashtray for $15 to put my mind at ease. By the time we were mostly free of mud, and she’d sent the two kids to their rooms to change into fresh clothes it was starting to get dark out. I remember feeling a little strange in their house because I hadn’t really spent much time inside it before. Though we were the best of friends, we’d always play hang out outside in the neighborhood, very rarely coming inside to break out our Star Wars figures. Anthony’s house smelled completely different than my own home which was a weird thing to notice as a child, but it was very distinct in my memory. His parents didn’t smoke like mine did, and there was a very flowery scent that wafted up from the carpet from the powdered vacuum deodorizer I saw his mom using while I waited for Anthony and his sister to get done changing into clean clothes. So, everything felt different and off inside his house.
The family invited me to stay for dinner, so Anthony’s mom called my mom for me and asked if I could stay over for a while. I must have gotten the okay because the next thing I recall is sitting up on a stool at their kitchen counter with a view of his mom breaking out a few cans of Chef Boyardee from the cupboard. I can still see the orange cans when I close my eyes and remember being excited. Well, that was until I saw his mom bring out a frying pan and eggs, cracking a couple of them into some melted butter that pooled in the pan. My mom was never one to cook breakfast for dinner, so I had no idea why she was frying up eggs when there was also some ravioli simmering on the stove next to it. What happened next changed the way I would view food for the next 30 years. Anthony’s mom dished out two bowls of ravioli for us and topped each one with a sunny side up fried egg. I can’t quite explain why, but the sight of Anthony breaking into the super runny yolk and mixing it with a heaping spoonful of Chef Boyardee made me so disgusted that I freaked out a little. It’s not that I had an issue with either the pasta or runny eggs, I loved both, but the combination of the two had me so nauseous that I had to abruptly excuse myself and I ended up running home, crying and feeling really weird and embarrassed. I’m not sure exactly what it was about that mix of food, carpet cleaner, and the strange (to me) odors in the house, but from that day forward it because nearly impossible for me to eat food prepared by anyone besides my parents or stuff I’d get out at fast food or restaurants. Whenever I attempted to eat outside my comfort zone I would have a physical reaction to the food, usually gaging or dry heaving. And this is why I always brought my lunch to school and why the smell of the cafeteria food turned my stomach.
As I looked down into the Thermos at the lukewarm Chef Boyardee raviolis, I could almost see my reflection in the sheen of the oily sauce. This feeling of dread mixed with nausea was battling against the coziness and happiness I knew I’d experience with the first spoonful of meaty ravioli. I really did not like my worlds colliding like this. while I was upset with my mother at the time, 40 years later I know in my heart that she was doing her best to try and make me feel loved by packing a lunch with some of my most-loved foods. She took the time to pick out the specific varieties of canned soups and pasta that were my favorites when she was out grocery shopping. skipping over the tins of beef-a-roni, Chunky Steak & Potato, or cream of chicken. She’d wake up extra early in the morning, open a can and nuke it in the microwave for a couple minutes before spooning it into my thermos, the thermos she washed by hand the night before and was set out to dry on a kitchen towel. As a father of two kids with extremely picky eating habits, I now know for a fact that she must have agonized over preparing my lunches with what she hoped I’d love. There were days when I’d screw the lid right back on the Thermos without eating a drop of the soup and just send it back home, and though at the time I was hoping that she’d get the message that being a soup kid was uncool, I know it probably broke her heart a little. When I open up my daughter’s lunch sack and the bag of green grapes that she begged for in the store is still in there, full and warm from sitting in the sack all day it makes my heart drop a little. When the little individually packaged “square cheese” morsel or the plain salami sandwich comes back home with my daughter it stings. Recently shoe told me that she stopped eating the salami at school because one of the girls at her lunch table always made faces when my daughter opened the Ziploc bag and a plume of meaty air wafted toward her classmate. She was embarrassed to be a salami sandwich kid, and I knew exactly what she meant as a recovering kid with a Thermos full of soup.
