Today marks the 30th anniversary of my house burning down. I've written about the details before (here and here) so I won't repeat myself. Instead, let's talk about lunch.
Lunch is one of the three most important meals of the day. The other two, of course, are breakfast and dinner.
After our house burned, we spent a month or two living in the Arlington Park Hilton (later the Sheraton and now gone). Each morning as Dave and I got ready for school, I called the restaurant to order our brown bag lunches. And each day, I ordered the same thing: a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich for Dave and a Ham and Cheese with mayo, lettuce and tomato for me.
Typically, we'd pick up our individual lunches when we went down for breakfast and then hop in the cab to school, but on this particular morning, rather than fixing two bags of lunch, the kitchen sent us just one bag, but said both our lunches were inside. For some reason that day, Dave and I decided that rather than stay at school for lunch, we'd run home and have a picnic lunch with Mom, so I didn't bother to divide up our lunches at school.
Three hours later, Dave and I surprised our mom who was at the house with the contractor. She grabbed her lunch and we all spread a blanket out on the lawn to enjoy our lunch together. Unfortunately, our Norman Rockwell-ish lunch didn't last long.
I opened the bag of sandwiches Dave and I picked up at the hotel only to discover that not only were our Peanut Butter and Jelly and Ham and Cheese sandwiches wrapped together in one large piece of foil, but they also shared two slices of bread. That's right, we received two pieces of bread containing mayo on both slices, ham, cheese, peanut butter, jelly, lettuce and tomato.
Let me repeat myself: in spite of having made us the same two sandwiches every day for a month or more, for some reason on that morning, someone in the kitchen thought I was asking for one sandwich that contained mayo, peanut butter, jelly, ham, cheese, lettuce and tomato.
Once my mom got past being irritated at having to get us McDonald's for lunch because there was nothing else we could get fast enough and still get back to school on time, we all enjoyed a good laugh.
To this day, thirty years later, we still laugh about the day Dave and I shared a PBJH&C sandwich.
What a story... Oh my! Thanks for sharing what became a smile, in the midst of something that was anything but!
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