What comes to YOUR mind when you are reading this week’s prompt and invitation to switch off your phones and screens to ponder? Here’s what comes to mine.
First and foremost, I never had paper bag lunches until I came to live in the U.S. My mother packed me second breakfasts for kindergarten and school, consisting of a sandwich carefully wrapped in parchment, and a cored apple in a cellophane bag. In kindergarten I also had a little flask with tea on me; in school, I simply went without. I went home for a hot lunch. During my adult life, I kept this on. Plus, there was usually a kitchen where we could make ourselves hot beverages. I never used the microwave. And there were business lunches, either buffet-style in a conference room, or at restaurants.
I knew about paper lunches, though. How did that come about?
One summer in Great Britain – it was a life changer for me for I fell in love with that country head over heels – my family was traveling from place to place to cover as many miles as possible in as few days as possible. It was the year of a certain Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding, and we had been lucky to have found accommodation all over the nation at affordable pricing shortly before the big event. Well, at some of the places we stayed, you could order lunch bags, and that was when I figured that they could be quite some fun if somebody put some love into them. We may have had three or four of those bags each, and indeed, I was never disappointed. I immediately fell in love with the salt and vinegar chips that usually came with the otherwise healthier options inside – my mother jokingly called them dried potato salad.
Since each of us had an individual bag, we could have eaten their content at any given time. But we were used to have meals together at home, and we didn’t break with the habit just because we were on the road for most of the time. My father used to be a very responsible driver, too, never eating or drinking behind the wheel. My mother fed us bits of snacks on longer road trips. But brown bag lunches were a meal – so, we would unpack our surprises after we had parked somewhere scenic to have lunch together.
These days, I find that there are brown bag events at different venues. Mostly, it seems to mean that you can bring your own and feel free to eat it. I always feel awkward eating AND having somebody elaborate on something, while they are hoping to get some more participation than one or another agreeing grunt out of food-filled, closed mouths.
My husband and I rarely do the lunch bag thing. Either, we are taking food along in a rucksack or in a cooler, or we go out. But there ARE those times that we sit in our car by the microphone of a drive-through, trying to convey the invisible person on the other end that we want one meal of this and not the meal but just the sandwich of another number, a small drink (they usually say they only have medium or large), etc. It’s never a surprise what’s in those bags. But we DO try to find a nice place to sit and eat and watch the world pass by.
You can get such nice surprise bags still, though. Not lunch but breakfast ones, filled thoughtfully with anything that makes sense for a rounded-out breakfast. Some hotels offer them besides their pretty good buffets, and sometimes they even offer them as an add-on! I took one just once – for nostalgia’s sake. It made me happy. I hope I didn’t take it from somebody who needed it more than I because they were too much in a hurry to sit and eat in leisure.
Paper bag lunches … for me, they have the vibe of being on the go. Of being restless and in a hurry. On the way to somewhere. Improvised. But if they are well-packed, they transmit the empathy of somebody else. And that can make one’s day.
