Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott Page A

sandwich meant white bread, one or two slices of bologna, mustard, one wilted piece of iceberg lettuce. (The Catholics were heavily into mayonnaise, which we might get into later.) Fathers, to begin with, always used nonregulation bread and then buttered it, which made the sandwich about as tradable as a plate of haggis. Also, everything was always falling out of the sandwiches fathers made. I’m not sure why. They’d use anything green and frilly for lettuce, when of course only the one piece of wilted iceberg was permissible. Your friends saw a big leaf of romaine falling out along with the slice of bologna, and you might soon find yourself alongside the kid against the fence.
    There was always that one kid against the fence. How could the rest of us feel Okay if there wasn’t? If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him. He didn’t end up at that station only because his lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity, but his lunches didn’t help.
    He almost certainly ended up being a writer.
    Now, who knows if any of this is usable material? There’s no way to tell until you’ve got it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write.
    I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked her for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away. I think this was some sort of Zen reference — the Buddhist disciple remembering Buddha’s flower sermon, in which all Buddha did was hold up a flower and twirl it, in silence, sitting on the mountain. Me, I’m a nice Christian girl, and while I wish I could quote something kicky and inspirational that Jesus had to say about writing, the truth is that when students ask me for the best practical advice I know, I always pick up a piece of paper and pantomime scribbling away. My students usually think this is a very wise and Zenlike thing for me to convey. Mostly, I forget to give Natalie Goldberg credit.
    But write about what? they ask next.
    Write about carrot sticks, I tell them:
    Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn’t even risk looking at the guy against the fence. Bad juju. If you so much as glanced at him, a visible empathetic arc would stretch between you, almost like a rainbow, and link you two in the minds of your peers forever.
    And then there was the matter of the wrapping paper; waxed paper and later Saran wrap. If code lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in life to be Okay, or even just to appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like Jughead had wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew that your parents were screwing up left and right. So it was a little like making your bed at lunch. Everything should be squared. Sandwiches should be wrapped with hospital corners. Right?
    Okay. That’s all. But now I have this material to choose from, to work with, to shape, edit, highlight, or toss. (And that’s very nice of you to suggest the latter.) This is my version of school lunches. Yours might be different and I would be interested in hearing about it. (Now don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting you mail it to me. But I bet it reveals some interesting stuff about you and your family and the times in which you