Fun Monday - Why Tuna Fish?

Our hostess this week is Faye from Summit Musings.

Our assignment?

... to share your memories of school lunches. What kind of school did you attend--public, private, parochial, city or country? Did you bring lunch from home or buy in the school cafeteria? Or, did you go home for lunch? What did your lunch look like? Who prepared it? Who did you have lunch with? Was this a happy part of the school day? What did you do during lunch time other than eat your PB & J sandwich?

I went to school back in the day when, by today's standards, our parents were trying to kill us. There were no car seats, no seat belts, no bicycle helmets, no pads except for professional football players and we drank warm milk at lunch time.

I went to Catholic school. Our school had no cafeteria and no gymnasium. We had no lockers and there was no lunchroom. Our lunches lived, in brown paper bags, under our desks until lunchtime, At lunchtime, we put our school materials inside our desk, took out our place mats, said grace, and ate lunch. There was milk available for $.10 but it had been sitting out in the breezeway since the milkman delivered it early in the morning. Most of us chose to just have water after lunch from the drinking fountain.

My mother made my lunch. Even after she started working nights, she still made our lunches. My dad always got lunch meat and cheese and us kids got peanut butter with homemade boysenberry jelly or jam. I so wanted store-bought Welch's grape jelly. I never got it. Mom also included a couple of homemade chocolate chip or peanut butter or oatmeal cookies which I always tried to trade for Oreos, This even though we were not allowed to trade food or even talk to each other during lunch. There was also a piece of fruit.

This menu only varied on Friday. Friday fasting was not contained to Lent when I was growing up but was an every Friday occurrence. On Friday, the peanut butter sandwich was exchanged for tuna fish. Yep, tuna fish that had been sitting in a bag on the floor in the classroom for 4 hours. It was warm and soggy and smelled nasty and everyone had the same thing. On rainy days, you could add the smell of wet wool sweaters for a truly memorable olfactory experience.

It wasn't until I was a grownup that I wondered why I could not have just had peanut butter - it's not meat, you know. Oh, well.

My grandson is in Catholic school now. His school not only has a cafeteria, it has some of the best cooks in town. They pride themselves on never repeating a menu during the month. Parents and grandparents alike stop in to have lunch with the kiddoes. Sometimes progress is a great thing.