So, who are you going to sit by at lunch?

It's back to school time. And you know what that means. It's time to panic about who will have the same lunch period as you - whether it will be your friends, or if YOU will be the only person you know in the lunch room during your assigned lunch period. If you're the new kid at school, not knowing anyone else on the first day of school is a sure thing.

The lunch period during the school years wasn't really about eating lunch. It was the only time of day we could really socialize. Lunch was actually something that just got in the way of talking. Although, lunch itself was often the topic of conversation too. In elementary school everybody was always checking out each others lunches - whether the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were cut into rectangle shapes or triangle shapes - or even four squares. Were the crusts cut off? Perhaps the sandwich was bologna and cheese. What else did everybody have besides the sandwich? This is where the trading began. Little Debbie snack cakes got swapped all over the table. It was a mini stock market.

My mom packed healthy lunches, so I usually didn't have anything kids wanted, which was not cool at the time, but now... thanks mom. I remember one time I had a banana that had some brown spots on it (the typical banana bruises). All it takes is one kid to go "ewwwww" and then the whole table is suddenly a chorus of "ewwwwwww grossssssss". Suddenly my banana was this diseased thing that had to be hidden away. Or else. What kid wanted to be known as the cooties girl who ate the diseased banana?

A big no-no at our school was dropping your lunch tray. It happened from time to time. Some kid would accidentally drop his tray on the hard floor and every kid in the lunch room would immediately take this as an opportunity to point and go "oooooooooooo" ("oo" rhymes with boo). It was a huge chorus of voices together in a rising glissando. Enough to make a kid run out of the room in tears. Luckily, I never dropped a tray. I usually carried a lunchbox rather than going through the hot lunch line.

Lunchboxes were also very important to the elementary school lunch experience. My first one was a Raggedy Ann tin one. I know I had a vinyl Annie one later. I don't recall if I had different lunchboxes in between. But, it seemed that lunchboxes were things that kids wanted to get new each school year. My brother had a cool Disney one shaped like a school bus. Later he had one from the movie The Black Hole. I didn't understand those practical Tupperware ones. Some kids had them, but to me they were so... plain. It was kind of neat the way the handles opened up on top though. Plus, you could decorate them with stickers. Still, mine had to reflect my current interest - Raggedy Ann, Little Orphan Annie, etc. One kid had this cool one that had a game spinner and a game on the side. We had some fun with that one. One unfortunate thing about lunchboxes is that they didn't keep lunches cool. At least not in Tennessee and Florida, which is where I lived when I was in elementary school. If your mom gave you milk for lunch, it was totally warm by lunch time. Not a fan of the warm milk.

One thing teachers loved to do at lunch time was to tell everyone to Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Hush! Be quiet! If you all don't keep it down....

In middle school the principal (or someone) thought it would be a brilliant idea to install a traffic light in the lunch room. We were to keep an eye on the light and we were supposed to adjust our volume by the color of the light. I think if it was green it meant that we were okay to keep talking at that volume and if it was yellow we were supposed to talk softer and if it was red we were supposed to shut up completely. Or, maybe green meant "Go ahead and shut up now" and red meant "You can stop shutting your mouths".

I was talking with an old friend last night who also said that he still didn't get what the light was all about either. It seemed unnatural and prison-ish. What was so wrong with kids talking during lunch anyway? They can't talk in class all day and lunch was their one big chance to practice their social skills. And judge each other. And create a little mini hierarchy based on what everybody else wore and where their parents lived and if the music they listened to was like... soooo last year. This was all very important stuff. Why would they want to put a stop to that?

It didn't work anyway. We still talk while we eat lunch. What's WRONG with us?

I always thought lunch at high school would be like the movie Grease where you get to eat outside and everyone looks older than high school age and you suddenly break into song and everyone magically knows all the lyrics. But, it wasn't like that.

It was more like, "I don't know anyone in this room. Where should I sit? Who should I sit with? I'm gonna go hide."

I was 14. Not yet old enough to drive AWAY from school to go have lunch, so I was stuck there. I got stuck in the lunch period where I didn't really know anybody. At first it was a nightmare. I would drift from table to table trying to find a group that wasn't too clique-ish. But, ninth grade was all about cliques. Eventually I ended up meeting some people who liked some of the same music as me. In high school, liking the same music was a requirement for a friendship. So, we'd talk about music and look at each other's artwork on our folders and add new band names to our folders and stuff like that.

In later high school years we could drive to lunch. After a while, the novelty wore off because it took so long to get to a restaurant and get your meal that by the time you finally got your food and sat down with your friends, it was time to go back to school. So, we ended up hanging out back in the cafeteria, and we made the most of it, laughing every day at the stupidest things. When we got loud, nobody had to turn on a red light. (Now I have the song "Roxanne" by The Police stuck in my head). We made fun of the way that spaghetti was scooped onto our trays with ice cream scoops. And nobody knew how to pronounce the gyros that were served to us.

We wondered what would happen after we graduated and if these really were the best days of our lives like teachers always warned us about: "These high school years are the BEST years of your lives, so you better enjoy them now because things will get a LOT tougher!" We hoped that they weren't the best years of our lives. The idea of your four best years happening from age 14 - 18 and the rest of your lifetime going downhill from there was wayyyy to creepy to us.

I'm still friends with some of the people I met in high school, but none of us would say those were the BEST years of our lives. Whew! What a relief!

It was definitely good at times though. There's nothing like strange looking lunch food to bond students together forever. 

From the Retropolis archives. This was originally posted August 10, 2005.