It was the best of lunch times; it was the worst of lunch times.
Since COVID has been going on, my husband has been working from home. We set up a makeshift office for him at the other end of our home, which helps keep our marriage together. (No, nothing’s wrong. We just both spend a lot of time on the phone for our jobs, and we would kill each other if we had to share the same room.)
One of the many benefits of both of us working from home is that we have lunch together pretty much every single day. Because we like as well as love one another, we haven’t wanted to kill each other during lunch. But that time spent together has resulted in some interesting conversations.
Some days, because of our work schedules and meetings/interviews, we will eat lunch extra early for us, about 11 a.m.
So we got to talking about the nightmare lunchtimes that we had to deal with in high school. For example, if you had an “early” lunch, it started anywhere from 10 to 10:30 a.m. If you’ve gotten up and eaten breakfast at 7 or 7:30 a.m., you probably weren’t hungry. But in high school, we had to eat when our lunch time was scheduled—whether we were hungry or not.
For my friends who bought lunch, let me tell you, there’s just nothing like watching a friend choke down pizza after 10 in the morning or perhaps a daily special like a hot roast beef with gravy and fries platter.
I usually brought lunch from home. At the time, my Mom still made my lunches, and she would freeze two grape juice boxes and put them in my lunch. That way, they would thaw and be cold at lunchtime.
This worked in theory, but not always in practice.
Some days I got stuck with “early” lunch. At my high school, this meant you were eating at a really weird time. Not 10, 10:15, or 10:30 a.m., but something stupid like 10:19 a.m. Seriously. They had us scheduled down to the minute.
“It’s 10:19 and thirty seconds—start eating!”
Here’s how it worked, we had 30 minutes from the bell to leave our previous class, go downstairs to the locker room (in my high school, all of our lockers were located in one big room—because with my lack of athletic prowess, I certainly wasn’t talking about a locker room connected to the gym.), remember your combination, open your locker, deposit your books, take out your lunch, and get to the cafeteria—and find the table that your group of friends had gotten for that day.
Because we were young, that only took about five minutes. Ten minutes tops.
Then you had to wolf down your lunch—unless you were standing in the lunch line buying it. I would often open my lunch, and it was nice and cold from the aforementioned frozen juice boxes. The problem is that sometimes, they were still partially frozen. I would keep holding and smashing the juice box in my hand, hoping that the body heat and movement would melt them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes I ate crushed, grape-flavored ice with lunch.
The only thing worse than first lunch was—wait for it—last lunch.
These were held at 12:19. As a still-growing kid at the time, when you had to eat this late, you were definitely famished. Starving. Sneaking snacks at noon. We probably got to our tables in three minutes on those days, just to get some kind of sustenance.
Today, as adults who are working from home, we get to choose our lunchtimes.
Or so we thought.
While we don’t have to eat as early as 10-something a.m., sometimes work commitments cause us to move lunch to 1 or even 1:30 p.m.
The only benefit is that we can get a snack to tide ourselves over without waiting for a nun or friar to scream at us for eating outside of lunchtime.
No matter what anyone says, sometimes adulting is absolutely fantastic.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not planning her lunch for a normal time like noon, writes
Wojo’s World® from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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