Two cent lunch

I've lost track of how many lunches I have consumed, oblivious at my desk, sandwich in left hand to free my right for the mouse. Lunch is mostly fuel in a working life: nuked leftovers, a pound of takeout swathed in petrochemicals, drive-thru cardiac incidents. It wasn't always so; somewhere I lost the knack for leisure, the rest and playfulness and companionship that once divided the day.

Not that I was ever a cafe caballero, lingering over latte and pondering Proust. What I miss is--somebody help me--the elementary school cafeteria. The simplest of fare--brown bag, white bread, gooey peanut butter, purple jelly--milk in a glass bottle, carrot sticks in wax paper, raisins in a cardboard box. And the company of two hundred other yammering children. One guy at my table would eat his sandwich down to the shape of a flipped "bird," for the benefit of his recess rivals. Another would squish the whole thing into his mouth at once, roll it into a glutinous ball and display it on extended tongue. I forget why. Carrot sticks can double as Dracula fangs. A California raisins box, once empty, makes a dandy kazoo. The uses of a milk straw are too numerous to mention, and the lunch bag itself can be inflated and exploded immediately behind a girl carrying a full tray of spaghetti and meatballs.

It's the greening grass that brings it all to mind, and the memory of milk--two cents for a half-pint bottle, stoppered with a cardboard tab. One day each year it would become transformed from funky white liquid into pure ambrosia, when the local dairyman switched from hay to pasture. You could see the Holstein it came from out the cafeteria window. If you had a good arm, you could hit it with a dried chip from the edge of the schoolyard.

Achieving liftoff

Yesterday was it--the day Spring became a reality instead of a theoretical possibility. Everyone has their own gauge. For some it's the first robin, but as far as I'm concerned, the early bird gets frostbite. For some it's the first snowdrops--but they get ahead of themselves, too. I look for the first sunny day in the 60s, and the first blue heron. Yesterday--double whammy.

If the heron has come back, you know it wasn't some flighty decision--they can, after all, barely fly. They seem to be a "proof of concept" design on the part of nature, rather than an actual production model. Watching them lumber up from the shallows is like watching a grainy newsreel of Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk. They graze the water with each downbeat, like a seaplane powered by oars. Both the principles of lift and the grace of God appear to be necessary to accomplish launch.

Just so my spirits. The blue body of winter is almost too massive for my wingspan to support. But give me sufficient open water, a little solar power assist, and up I go--eventually.

Where did the future go?

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.