My friend Larry is a professional artist. Every morning he walks down to his studio carrying a lunch. The bag itself is unremarkable by modern standards—insulated gray fabric, zipper top, vaguely shaped like an old-time doctor's bag. Perfectly serviceable. Perfectly contemporary.
But watching him leave one morning, lunch swinging at his side, something kicked loose in my head.
Suddenly I was back in Pittsburgh, decades ago as a child, watching my father head off to work at the Universal Cyclops steel mill. He crossed a rickety pedestrian bridge each morning, his own gray lunch bucket swinging from his hand. Dad's lunch pail was serious equipment—metal, with a Bakelite handle and a humped lid that sheltered a fragile glass Thermos filled with coffee.
When I started elementary school, I got my own lunch bucket—a rectangular metal box decorated with Fred Flintstone, Wilma, and Bam-Bam. It had a Thermos too, though smaller than my father's, with a wide mouth meant for soup. Inside the box you'd usually find a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a banana, and—on especially good days—a wax-paper-wrapped slice of apple pie.
Thank you, Mom.
By high school, though, lunch buckets were radioactive. If I brought food from home at all, it came in a brown paper bag, destined to be tossed into the cafeteria trash along with a hundred identical bags.
Later still, working in New York, lunch itself became optional. Meals were eaten standing up at fast-food counters or hunched over pizza slices with coworkers, usually on a park bench, before being swallowed by some enormous office building again.
For the past few years, however, teaching at the local college, I find myself carrying a lunch bag once more. Like Larry's, it's insulated fabric. But its shape leans closer to my father's old lunch bucket than to my Flintstones box. Charcoal gray. No Thermos this time—just a little plastic square of frozen blue ice keeping a ham sandwich cold.
Sometimes, as I sit at my office desk and unpack my meal, I think of my father up in his smoky control cab, maneuvering glowing steel ingots through the rolling mill—pausing just long enough to eat the sandwiches my mother had made that morning.
A home-made meal packed with purpose, and with love.
The same quiet ritual, passed hand to hand through family and friends.
