By Gary Rotto
SAN DIEGO — I made my final school lunch for my daughter yesterday. For sixteen years, I’ve made lunches for her. It all started with a simple brown paper bag. The ubiquitous brown bag has been the choice of families for lunches for decades.
Until she was two, Kelila was under the care of a wonderful woman in the Tierrasanta neighborhood of San Diego. And just before she turned two, with tears our eyes we said good bye as it was time for Kelila to attend preschool. At the Nierman Preschool at the Lawrence Family JCC in the La Jolla neighborhood, we began to send lunch with Kelila. Of course, we put the love into each and every meal as we sent our little girl off on her daily adventure.
And as any parent knows, you need to make sure that the child’s name is on the lunch bag that you send to school. The naming of the lunch was simple enough – just her name in black marker to begin. But we wanted to make the bag extra special, showing some love for the brown bag, so we used a colored marker. And then we started to alternate colors with each letter of her name having its own color. So, her mom and I had an unconscious contest to see who could make the most colorful bag. We didn’t do anything outlandish and embarrassing, just drawing swirls or stars or other designs to adorn the bag and call attention to her name.
The lunches at the JCC needed to be dairy or parve. There are only so many lunches that a preschooler or kindergartener likes – peanut butter and jelly, tuna, cheese tend to be the standards. Many children do not like crust. I certainly didn’t as a child. So I came up with the idea of taking a round pastry mold and cutting out the sandwich in the round shape to eliminate the crust. I’d crimp the edges to make sure tha the sandwich would stay together and into a baggie and in the customized brown bag it would go. One day, I came up with the idea of putting a few colorful sprinkles on the sandwich. Since it was the tuna sandwich on which I first used this condiment, my daughter insisted that only the tuna sandwiches could be colorful. And so it went for years, continuing when she when to the San Diego Jewish Academy in the Carmel Valley neighborhood.
There were many days that she would have a hot lunch at SDJA, but many days on which she would take a lunch. The use of the colorful bags waned over the years, but even into high school, my daughter took a lunch on most days. The fare would expand so that by this year – her senior year in high school – the rotation included a crisp green salad with honey mustard dressing in a small container, hummus with carrots, gluten free pretzels with peanut butter as a dip.
As I went to the supply drawer to pull out the clear bags that we now use, I noticed something brown at the bottom of the drawer. Colors reflected as the light shone on the paper that I pulled forth from the drawer. It was one leftover bag from many years ago, the last bag of my daughter’s childhood. I showed it to my daughter and she smiled. We thought for a few moments about using the bag with her colorful name. But we decided to save it, that reminder of her early years she can always look at in our scrapbook and think about the lunches into which we put a little love to carry her through her day.
It was time to make the final lunch. Out of all the options, from the varied pallet that my daughter now poses, what would she like for her last school lunch? Peanut butter and jelly, the simple reminder, the simple flavors of her childhood.
*
Rotto is a freelance writer based in San Diego. You may comment to him at gary.rotto@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.