Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

schools, twenty years earlier than mine, or ten years later, in Southern California or New York. And they always turn out to be similar to my middle-class Northern California public school lunches. But in important ways they are different, too, and this is even more interesting, for the obvious reason that when we study the differences, we see in bolder relief what we have in common. And for some strange reason, when my students start to jam with me about school lunches, they get off the phone feeling more enthusiastic and in better shape.
    One time, in one of my classes, I asked my students to write about lunches for half an hour, and I sat down with them and wrote:
    Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is. It was a precursor of the showers in seventh- and eighth-grade gym, where everyone could see your everything or your lack of everything, and smell the inside smells of your body, and the whole time you just knew you were going to catch something. The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like some people, were Okay, and some weren’t. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple.
    But in half an hour there was already too much material for me and some of the people in class, and it threatened to immobilize us. So we decided not even to bother with our parents’ handwriting on the outside of the brown paper lunch bag—how much it resembled a Turkish assassin’s and what that said about us. We decided to set aside the bag itself for a moment. For the time being we’d stick with the contents, and, to begin with, the sandwich. That was the one-inch picture frame we were going to look through.
    Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue.
    Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry, for instance—
    Now, see, I couldn’t remember, as I wrote in class, just exactly what it was about raspberry jam that was so disconcerting. So when I got home that night, I called a friend who is also a writer, very successful and maybe the most neurotic person I know. I said, Remember how in elementary school, grape jelly was best in your lunch, strawberry jam was Okay, but raspberry was real borderline? Can you talk to me about your experiences with these things? And my friend went into an impassioned, disoriented riff about how there was too much happening in raspberry jam, too many seeds per spoonful. It felt like there were all these tiny little pod people in it. It was Body-Snatcher jam.
    My friend then mentioned apricot jam, which was even worse than raspberry. I had not thought about this in thirty years, but now it all came back with horrible clarity. Apricot jam looked too much like glue, or mucilage. But you could count on having apricot jam when your father made the lunch. Fathers loved apricot jam; I don’t know why, but I’m sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.
    I sat down that night and kept writing:
    In general, come to think of it, when fathers made lunches, things always turned out badly. Fathers were so oblivious back then. They were like foreigners. For instance, a code bologna