A day indoors at summer camp and a win for patriotism
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Brenner’s Bakery
I’m still in touch with my best friend whom I’ve known since 1954. Every time we talk or get together, even if it’s been after many years, the topic of food in our childhood is brought up, once again. We lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., outside of Alexandria, VA. There was a small shopping center a few miles away, but because my folks only had one car, Saturday had to be their weekly shopping day. I always went with my family, and usually my friend for this outing. We would run off on our own (at ages seven and eight) to the drug store and to the Ben Franklin, with our allowance. This might cover one candy bar, or maybe a comic book. Sometimes we had to save for a few weeks for these treasures. We would eye all the paper dolls while there, too. In the summer, we always stopped in at the bakery. Brenner’s Bakery had not only the usual cakes and cookies, but also a soft ice cream machine, or frozen custard, actually What heaven to get a cone of soft, rich, swirly, chocolate ice cream!
Art Lessons
Only now does the sheer phallic audacity of that picture make me chuckle.
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School Day Lunch
There were three possible lunches on school days: regular lunchbox lunch; rainy day lunch; and lunch at home.
On regular days, I opened my metal lunchbox (blue lid and bottom, silver-gray between) to find a sandwich neatly wrapped in waxed paper, made with stiff, dense, brown whole wheat bread. It might be peanut butter, or pimiento cheese with lettuce, or maybe a ham slice, also with lettuce. There would be an apple or a tangerine or a banana. And there would be a little packet of dessert: candied prunes, dark, sticky, and wrinkled–tasty, but so embarrassing that I’d have to eat them quickly, out of sight. Other kids, whose sandwiches were made with soft, white Wonder Bread and baloney, and whose dessert was chocolate chip cookies from a package, stared at my lunches and were glad not to be me. I am grateful to my mother for insisting on healthful food, but I do wish she had taken the social dimension into account and given me some junk every now and then.
Rainy day lunch was more or less the same but with one wonderful addition: hot soup in the thermos. We got to eat at our desks in the classroom if it was raining. I would unscrew the red plastic top of my thermos bottle and discover inside either tomato soup or cream of mushroom, both Campbell’s, both delicious. The classroom lights glowed in a special way on those dark noons. An unusual quiet prevailed, monitored by the teacher, sitting at her desk, eating her lunch along with us. It was strange and rather thrilling to see that teachers, too, ate lunch.
And sometimes I went home for lunch, a walk or bike ride of five blocks or so. There at the formica table in the kitchen, my sister and I might have creamed chipped beef on toast, or creamed sweetbreads (I knew what they were, though they had that phony name), or melted cheese sandwiches, or an interesting toasted sandwich made with a special implement–I think it might have been called the Toastite. It was a metal clamshell with handles about 18 inches long. You opened the clamshell, put the bread and the filling in there, closed it up, and held it over one of the burners on the stove until the bread got hot and crispy. Whatever happened to the Toastite?