CityView Magazine

8 August 2023 Claire Mullen can be reached at clairejlmullen @gmail.com. FAMILY MATTERS Packed with love BY CL AIRE MULLEN altogether. en, I would be able to report this oversight to my teacher, and perhaps the sympathetic cafeteria ladies would bless me with a tray like many of my classmates, and, for once, I could partake in the true culinary experience that was school cafeteria lunch. But who was I kidding? e woman who filled thermoses with homemade soup and packed whole kiwis along with a special little plastic kiwi tool just for slicing and scooping them forget her eldest daughter's lunch? Not a chance. ere would be no peach halves in delicious high-fructose corn syrup for little Claire Long. No canned green bean and corn medley. No yeast rolls. No instant mashed potatoes in their perfect ice-cream scoop dome. Not even one morsel of rectangle pizza or sip of chocolate milk from a paper carton. I would push my thick glasses up my nose and cast my gaze down into my neatly packed Igloo at what was most certainly not a cafeteria lunch. e curious kid to my le would take one look at my pita sandwich, stop mid-pizza bite, and marvel, "Is that grass on your sandwich??" Alfalfa sprouts; same difference. As I unloaded the rest of my meal, I'd discover a whole boiled egg that Mom had peeled for me and placed in a baggie along with two tiny paper packets: Salt and pepper. Stalks of celery that she had carefully cut into symmetrical sticks and filled with peanut butter topped with a neat line of raisins: "Ants on a Log." For dessert, Mom had tucked in a 100% strawberry fruit leather. My best friend would take pity on me and lean over to allow me to swipe one tiny graham cracker from her plastic Dunkaroo container and dip it into the delicious confetti frosting while she held her nose, avoiding a wa of my smelly boiled egg. And the funny thing is, although I never would have admitted it back in third grade, I actually liked all the lunches my mom prepared, alfalfa sprouts and all. I savored every bite and secretly loved that she sometimes cut my extra healthy sandwiches B lack Forest ham, shaved extra thin, and lacey Swiss cheese tucked inside a whole-grain pita pocket, spread with a schmear of garden vegetable cream cheese and finished with a sprinkling of fresh alfalfa sprouts. One would think this might be an offering on the lunch menu of a posh downtown deli. No. Well, maybe. But the sandwich that I'm referring to was only one of the many gourmet creations that I would discover on any given day in my lunchbox at Alma Easom or Vanstory Hills elementary schools, courtesy of Susanne Long. My mother, let's just say, had quite the flair for packing school lunches. I'll set the scene for you. ere on the long lunch table bench I would sit, surrounded by a sea of PBJs on Wonder Bread and rectangle pepperoni pizza slices on plastic cafeteria trays. I'd look to my le and right to see if anyone was watching before I dared to open my neon pink and aqua Igloo MiniMate hard-sided cooler lunchbox — one of the funnier mid-90s back-to-school fads. I can only imagine that as we all filed down the hallway to the cafeteria holding our little plastic coolers, we looked like a diminutive construction crew breaking from a long a.m. shi of hard labor rather than hungry third- graders who'd just finished the morning's grammar and arithmetic lessons. Before pressing the little button on the side and sliding open my cooler, I would say a silent prayer that on this week's grocery day, the Lord would have changed my Mama's heart right there in the Teeter and led her away from the produce section and deli counter right to the ham and cheese Lunchables, with a quick detour down the snack aisle for a box of Fruit Roll-Ups and a bag of Cheetos puffs. I would have actually considered it a miracle if I had opened my lunchbox to find nothing at all. Just maybe in the hustle and bustle of making lunches for my three siblings, mom had forgotten mine with heart-shaped cookie cutters and adorned my napkins with seasonal stickers or wrote special love notes on fancy stationery. I think I pretended to be embarrassed by the contents of my lunchbox because when you're 8 years old, you just want to fit in. To be one of 20 other pepperoni pizzas. But now that I'm older than my mom was at her lunch-packing prime with two children of my own, I realize what a labor of love those school lunches really were. She was a working mom with four young children who could have easily slipped us a couple of bucks for a cafeteria tray or stocked the fridge with a five-day supply of Lunchables. at would have been perfectly OK, and some days, we might have even preferred that. But I think that for my mom, cleaning up from dinner and diving right into her signature thoughtful customization of well-balanced, unique, and, yes, sometimes over-the-top lunches for the next day was intentional. It was more than just remembering who preferred ham over turkey, which of us wanted mayo instead of mustard, and who wouldn't survive if the crusts remained intact. It was an expression of love, care and thoughtfulness for each of her four kids. I could only laugh when my daughter came to me not long ago with one single lunchbox request for the quickly approaching new school year. "Mom, do you think that this year you could maybe make my sandwiches with the normal kind of bread like other kids have? You know, the kind that isn't brown and doesn't have seeds in it?" And so, on my annual back-to-school grocery run, I'll honor her request and throw a loaf of good ol' Wonder Bread into my cart. Right beside the alfalfa sprouts.

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