I was just having dinner on my pink velvet couch in my over priced one bedroom apartment in Hayes Valley, San Francisco and I suddenly had a sensory flashback to eating lunch when I was twelve.
Specifically.
A turkey and cheddar cheese Lunchable.
It was delicious.
I could actually taste the melt of the processed cheese in my mouth, the little circular slab of pressed turkey meat and the knock-off butter cracker round and how if I chewed it just so I could savor it for long moments at a time.
It was one of the few things that had enough preservatives in it that it did not spoil in the heat.
Unlike a lot of the kids I did not have a cooler for my lunch and things could go bad quickly in the humid mid-summer heat of Wisconsin.
Especially when said lunch was being stowed underneath an interior seat of a yellow Blue Bird school bus that had been parked by the corn field I was detassling.
Detassle.
To remove the female sex organs from a corn stalk so that the corn does not impregnate itself.
(Definition now from Wikipedia: Detasseling corn is removing the pollen-producing flowers, the tassel, from the tops of corn (maize) plants and placing them on the ground. It is a form of pollination control,[1] employed to cross-breed, or hybridize, two varieties of corn.)
I was a corn detassler.
It was my first job.
I was twelve.
I worked for Kaltenberg Seed Farms.
Kaltenberg was able to get away with paying children less than minimum wage to work in the fields due to a law on the books in Wisconsin which exempted farms from having to pay minimum wage as farming was a “family” business.
Kaltenberg was not my family, but it didn’t stop them from hiring local kids in the area and underpaying them for working in the fields eight hours a day.
It paid $2.75 an hour.
If you had near perfect attendance through the summer without missing more than three shifts you would get bonused to $3.25 an hour.
That was my goal.
And I made it.
I had perfect attendance.
I detassled corn for three summers, I think, it might have been four, although the last summer I was a “rogu’er” which meant you stalked through the fields cutting down with a hoe the “rogue” corn that would ocassionally grown gigantically tall in the fields and suck all the water and nutrients from the other corn stalks around it.
I had gotten put on the rogue crew the summer before at the end of the season, I was tall, and strong and I was asked if I wanted to make “extra” money that summer by helping rogue the last three weeks of the season.
It overlapped with school, but I did it anyway, on the weekends.
That summer I saved all my money and went to East Town Mall and bought a brown bomber leather jacket with a white rabbit fur collar.
My first fashion splurge.
That’s all I bought, fyi, there was no more money to spend after that.
I remember when one of the very popular, tall, thin, beautiful blonde girls on the swim team, envied my jacket after I got on the swim team bus home from a meet.
I couldn’t afford to eat at the McDonalds that the coach took us too, but I could assuage my hunger with the envious gaze of the tall swim goddess who briefly, impulsively reached out to stroke the white fur of the collar as I slid by onto the bus, muttering, “so soft, so pretty.”
I ate out on that for the ride home amidst the smell of cheeseburgers and french fries.
This all swam up in my mind as I sat on the couch last night, I started this blog last night, but then I started making phone calls as I have been in distress the last few days and I called my people and cried on the phone.
So much crying.
My stomach has been so upset that I have had very little appetite, dinner last night was a couple slices of cheddar cheese and some turkey slices from Whole Foods.
The turkey cheese combo made me remember the taste of a Lunchable and how thrilled I was whenever I got to have one for lunch when I was detassling.
Most of the time lunch was a plain raw peanut butter sandwich on very dense whole wheat bread that my step father got from the Willy Street Co-op in Madison.
I have reflux when I get stressed and it has been on fire this week.
I am also in perio-menopause, huzzah, and I had thought that my hot flashes were under control, but hahahah, no, stress flared them right back up, I’m about to have one right now as I am writing.
Sigh.
Anyway.
I keep waking up at night hot and weepy and tired and heart achy and my stomach rumbles and my head hurts and then I can’t go back to sleep.
My brain on fire.
I thought I would put out my gastrointestinal fires with plain cheese and turkey, a banana and water.
Simple food.
And it made me think about all the foods or lack thereof, that I had as a child.
Granted, I have some gratitude for the experience as I learned how to cook and how to make food stretch, how to season things and how to scrape up a meal with all the paltriest items in a pantry.
I learned also how to make soup, pie crusts from scratch, jelly, jams, canned tomatoes, tomato juice, apple cider, sauerkraut, pickles.
So I have appreciation for not just my Midwestern, uprooted from California, roots, but gratitude for the learning and the power of stretching a roast chicken through a week and a half of meals for four people–Bisquick, people, remember that yellow box of joy? You take the left over chicken shreds picked off the carcass, throw them in a skillet, add an onion, some garlic, peas, and a can of cream of mushroom soup, make biscuits, from the box, just add water, or milk if you’re feeling fancy, bake them up, pop them out of the muffin pan, split in half and top with butter, then ladle the gravy with chicken bits over the biscuits– meals for days.
I also can reflect here, in my home, that I can go anytime to Whole Foods and drop a ridiculous amount of money and buy only organic food.
Or I can go to Rainbow Grocery, a local worker owned co-op, and spend even more money, and do the same.
I used to dream about being able to spend whatever I want at either of those stores. I would often walk around with a pad of paper and a pen and literally tally up what was in my basket so I didn’t go over my budget for food.
I still have a spending plan for food, but I no longer carry around a piece of paper, I feel like sometimes I just willy nilly throw whatever into my cart and happily pull money out of my wallet without thought.
I am still shocked but I don’t express it and I don’t pull food back from the conveyor belt and ask the clerk to remove it from my purchases.
I also no longer eat: government processed cheese, hot dogs, ramen, canned tuna, powdered milk or instant potatoes.
I am grateful for the memory of the Lunchable.
Granted I wouldn’t eat one now if you paid me.
It took away the stress for a moment and reminded me of how far I have come from that little girl walking through the corn fields eight hours a day in the summer pulling out the hearts of corn and looking forward to cool cups of water in paper cones from the orange coolers by the bus. The taste of a turkey cheddar cheese cracker in the shade, while squatting in the dry grass and dirt with my back against a tire, looking out at the field of corn shimmering under the noon day sun.
Small musing from this heart of sorrow while I look out the window of my apartment into the memory of those summer days in Wisconsin.
You’ll be ok baby girl.
You’ll be ok.
Auntiebubba 