Lunch Box Incident

     The Lunch Box Incident

    Sometimes things happen when you least expect them to; such was the case with Jane. 

    Walking home from school was always more stimulating than on the way there. It wasn’t that I didn’t like school, I had negotiated a truce; I would tolerate it, it would tolerate me. So far it has been working pretty well. There are times when I’m disappointed, but my bar is high and the school seems to have no trouble getting over it.

    Thursdays for some reason are worse than other days. Mondays are awful, Fridays are wonderful, Tuesdays are tolerable, and Wednesdays are less bearable.

    I’ve always had problems when it comes to optimism. I could never find a reason that the word should exist, let alone accept its meaning. To be optimistic is not in my nature. I can visualize a day when that may not be the case, but until that time I will remain, not so much pessimistic as less hopeful.

    I know from talking with my friends that hopeful and optimism in their minds are one and the same. I’ve attempted to enlighten them on the difference between being hopeful and optimist, but they don’t seem to care. Optimism to me means always looking on the bright side of things, whereas hopeful invites a nemesis in to do the play by play. 

    The dictionary states that optimism and hopeful are for all practical purposes the same word, interchangeable, both exhibiting confidence. I however see the word hopeful as being promising, which allows for the chance something can go wrong, and optimism, refusing to believe anything can go wrong.

If you are a hopeful person you might turn on the weather channel and watch the predicted snow storm slide to the north. While hope waits for the next storm system, optimism is in the garage looking for a snow shovel.

    It was a Thursday at 3:15 PM when I received a note from Jane asking me to meet her behind the school by the large green dumpsters. I was confused by the invitation after what had recently happened between us. 

    Our walk home from school resembles a snake slithering across a road; class mates dropping off as we approach either their home or an artery that will take them there. I am the last one in the line remaining, although I live next to the school. My mother doesn’t get home from work until 4:00, so I walk with my classmates. 

    The line is divided into two segments. The boys are in front and the girls behind. Where you end up in the line depends on how quickly you are able to gather your books and  run down the stairs, providing no teacher is present, and join the growing line that winds its way toward home.  .

    There is also a place where the boys and girls are forced to tolerate each other’s presence.  The end of the boys line and the beginning of the girls; I call it the twilight zone. The freedom it affords adds a hopeful sign in an otherwise optimistically laden time in our lives, the promise of Junior High.

    I didn’t mention my rendezvous with Jane to my friends. I made up an excuse for not being in the line that day; I can’t even remember what it was, but I’m sure they managed to make it home without my help. 

    It wasn’t that I was afraid to tell them about my meeting with Jane, but I knew it would only complicate things. Everyone knew of the lunch box incident and I didn’t really want to have to answer an assortment of questions about something I had no way of answering. 

    One day on the way home from school, amidst the jockeying to find a place in the pecking order, someone said something about God. We never spoke about God, just as we never spoke about our families. It was just not done. So when someone said “God” loud enough for everyone to hear, all conversations and progress stopped. 

    I remember how everyone was looking at those around them  attempting to determine who the blasphemer was.  They all donned innocent faces and pretended to be shocked that anyone would have the impudence to utter the word “God” outside of school or church. That one word caused the suspension of our routine.

    When you go to a religious school you learn certain things are off limits, as well as being sacred. We learn things, but are never told why. Asking I found out resulted in punishment. Not the serious punishment that fighting or swearing resulted in, but a chastisement and questioning of our personal commitment to God. The word God was used frequently during school hours, but was deemed an unacceptable choice once released into a world of questionable morality, or it could be for the same reason that after eating 8 Twinkies, you never want to see another one. 

    The God word on this particular Thursday afternoon had frozen us in our tracks. The line generally wobbled as well as swelled as we moved about in search of acceptance from the very people who were also roaming about looking to be accepted.

    It might have been, now that I think back on it, a sign of immaturity that we concealed with a label of being popular or unpopular. Being popular to us was as important as the city of Troy was to the wooden horse that proved to be its downfall.

    Popularity depended on many different attributes that aren’t necessarily related. You could be good at sports, be good looking, be smart, but not too smart, or be someone who was very shy, which everyone took to mean you were somehow mysterious; that made you one of the untouchables. 

    I never did find out where I fit into the pecking order, but found I was content to blend into the mass of uncertainty that was our student body. 

    It was somehow different for girls. They seemed to be more concerned with how things looked, especially themselves, than about the important things in life, like baseball, cars, and motorcycles. I never talked to girls about why they were like they were, so I had to speculate as to the why’s and wherefores of the creed they lived by. I guess there is an unwritten code we all live by that forbids us to seek certainty, which allows us to remain happy in our ignorance. Sometime too much knowledge is damaging to an adolescents self-esteem.

    I had agreed to meet Jane after school on that Thursday. I thought I had arrived before she did. I stood outside the wooden fence that kept the “unsightly dumpsters” from public view and patiently waited. Several minutes went by, and no sign of Jane. I had decided to leave after what I considered a reasonable time, twenty minutes, when suddenly she appeared. She opened the gate and stood there looking at me with the smug look she uses to gain what she believes is leverage, I thought it made her look like her mother.

    “Didn’t know you were here,” I said hoping to put things on a more even footing. 

    “I just wanted to see how long you’d wait,” and that was that. We made our way through the gate and found seats on the two trash cans that were in close proximity to one another. I still wasn’t sure what she wanted. The last time we had spoken, she spoke, I said nothing.

     When you hear something, it is not necessarily what actually is said, but you are unaware of that fact at that time. I don’t know if it is our mind playing tricks on us or our ears, but it does make for interesting statements that are not related to any of the vocabulary previously. Usually the distortions occur when you are at your most vulnerable; not paying attention or willfully not listening.

    That particular Thursday I found myself in what we considered the twilight zone. I had been late getting out of school, Miss Anderson stopped me and asked if I planned to enter the student writing competition. It was the first I’d heard of it, but having had similar experiences with teachers before, I said “yes, of course.” Those three words seemed to make Miss Andersons Day. She was beaming like a Halloween Jack-o lantern as I left. I would guess that when a student does well in the larger school forum, a beneficial reflection is cast on their teacher.

    Jane, being the first to leave school, was at the front of the girls line, while I was at the back of the boys. It put us in the twilight zone together. I rarely if ever spoke to any of the girls in my class, or in the entire school for that matter. I had nothing to say that I thought they’d be interested in, and from the bits of conversation I picked up during recess and in the hall between classes, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

    As I mentioned, there are certain words or phrases that although not prohibited, their use is frowned upon; for that reason we did not use those words. It wasn’t because we thought we’d get in trouble, but we weren’t entirely sure we wouldn’t either. The unspoken belief was that it was safer not to. It wasn’t that we were short of words, some of the words we used were notably worse than the words we were expected to leave out of our vocabularies.

    Something occurred at the front of the boys line. I was never clear what it was, but out of nowhere came this torrent of words. I had been talking to Zeke Geiser, we were to be partners in science class. Something to do with dissecting frogs or ameba, I forget which. Jane was busy whispering to Emily; something about a Sadie Hawkins dance where the girls ask boys to be their dates, assuring they will have someone to dance with besides other girls. I never went because for one thing I can’t dance, no one had taught me. I felt I would look and feel like a fool. I think that boys dancing, other than for a few, look like deranged puppets.

    When the word arrived at the end of the boys line and the beginning of girls, I wasn’t listening, but planning with Zeke how we should go about dissecting whatever it was we were supposed to dissect. 

    I’m sure what I heard was not what was actually said, but I believed at the time it was. I heard “rats ass.” Now I don’t know if what was actually said was Matt’s mass, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t rats ass, even though I would swear on a stack of non-Gideon Bibles that rats ass is what I heard.

    Father Matt was a young priest who didn’t stand on ceremony. He asked us when we were in public to refer to him as Matt. I thought it was abnormal, but then I was used to living with protocol and the thought of it not being there to guide me through uncertain times, which is all the time when you are in sixth grade, was unthinkable.   

    “Rats ass? I should have said nothing, or if I felt I needed to say something, kept my question below a resonance level that wouldn’t have stopped all other conversations and left my words floating in the air like a Goodyear Blimp, for what seemed like hours. 

    I looked at the improvised shocked faces that had all turned their heads in my direction. Some of the boys had half smiles on their faces, many of the girls for some reason had a hand over their mouths, but not their ears. They looked at me like Pontus Pilot must have looked at Christ.

    I again found day dreaming preferable to the inquisition and lowered my head and pretended I was in deep conversation with Zeke. Zeke, however, thought the better of being associated with a foul mouth like me and had slipped out of the line and was in the process of crossing the street.    

    I followed his progress in an attempt to take my mind off what had happened and was happening, when I felt a sudden pain in my head as I was falling backwards toward the ground. I don’t know if I blacked out for a second, but when I regained what composure I had left, I looked up to see Jane standing above me, her slightly dented Dale Evans lunch box at her side.

    I thought I detected a bit of blood on the corner of the box just above Dale Evan’s horse Geronimo. I didn’t know what to do. It certainly was one of the more embarrassing moments I’d experienced, but the pain seemed to nullify any concern I had about being humiliated.

    “You shouldn’t use words like that in front of girls. Hasn’t your mother taught you anything?” And that was that. The line moved on leaving me sitting on the sidewalk wondering what had happened, and was what I said, really all that bad?

    I had probably only spoken to Jane twice in my life before that day. As I sat on the walk watching the line wiggle its way toward homes, I realized there was nothing I could do to change my position, but also knew that sixth graders had the attention span of a nat. 

    So, you can understand how being asked to meet after school in such a clandestine spot, I didn’t know what to think. I should have refused considering she nearly killed me the last time our paths crossed, but there is something about secret meetings that has always intrigued me. Probably because you don’t know where they will take you, and when you are in the sixth grade, anywhere is better than where you are at.

    “So, why did you ask me here?”

    I thought I might as well get over it with so I could move on to more important things, like the scratch ball game at the park that afternoon. I rarely got picked the first six times, so I thought I had time to make it to the park before the game started.

    “Wanted to apologize for… you know, the incident.”

    The incident? I was nearly killed and she calls it an incident. 

     ”That’s OK, don’t sweat it. Hey, I got a ball game so if there’s nothing else…”

      She continued to look at me from atop her trash can. She suddenly slid from the trash can and walked toward me. I didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t have her lunch box, but there was plenty of gravel at her disposal. 

    “I’ve got to get going,” I said. Having to sit for six innings on a bench in the sun if you are late, while others show off their talents, is humiliating. 

    She continued to walk toward me and then stopped. She did something that surprised me more than being hit in the head with a lunch box, just for saying words that really weren’t all that bad. She stood on her toes and kissed me, right on the lips.

    “Why’d you do that?... I told you it was OK. The lunch box thing, it’s done, over, let’s forget about it.”

    There is something about garbage and flies.  They form a symbiotic relationship that can’t be ignored. Both Jane and I had been swinging at what appeared to be, invisible spirits. Between the flies, the smell, and Jane’s promiscuous act, I knew I had to leave.

    “I just wanted to see how it felt. Now that I have, I can forget about it. When something begins to possess my thoughts, I find the best way to have it stop is by acting upon it. So what did you think?”

    I was reluctant to answer. I have a scar above my right eye where the lunch box enforced her retribution for something that wasn’t all that bad, it wasn’t even on the list of words we refrain from using. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was those who raised their righteous flags and fake expressions that should feel hypocritical. 

    “It was OK I guess. I wasn’t expecting it, so you caught me off guard. When I’m caught off guard my lips as well as my entire scalp begin to tingle and then go numb. The same feeling I get when they make us use that lice shampoo.”

    She continued to look at me with a pitiful expression, as though I’d disappointed her. 

    “I’ve got to go,” she said. Youth Group meeting at 4:30, don’t’ want to miss that.” I watched her push the gate open and disappear. 

    We graduated the six grade that May and that was the last time I saw Jane until several years later. I was sitting under a tree pretending to read when I looked up and saw who I thought was Jane, lying on a blanket in a bathing suit in the sun, not far off. I was staring in an attempt to decide if it actually was her, when she looked up suddenly and caught me staring. I lowered my gaze and pretended to be lost in thought. 

    A short time later a shadow engulfed me. I looked up and there she was. “Remember me?” she asked. There was no doubt that I did.

    Jane?” was all I could think of to say.

    “You should call me sometime. It would be fun to catch up.”

     I looked surprised when she bent down, kissed me on the cheek, turned and walked across the grass toward the pavilion.

    A Grandmother’s kiss. I wondered what I’d said wrong?