My two kids have never eaten school lunch. Food allergies, highbrow tastes, lowbrow tastes, we cover the waterfront. That means 10 bag lunches a week through the school year, and until the teenage years, most of summer and school breaks as well. I'd ballpark it at 400 to 500 lunches a year, all but a fraction prepared by my wife, Amy.
Our day starts early, because school begins at 7:30 a.m. It's not easy, before it's even light, to have much of a conversation about the day ahead with a sleepy teen or an emotional adolescent or a grade-schooler in a TV trance. So Amy has found a different way to connect.
The most notable item in each child's lunch box is a recycled paper napkin; we buy them by the hundreds. They don't stand up to much, especially a felt-tip pen, but it is the chosen medium their mom uses to send a message each day, a tradition she learned from her mother, who passed away last summer.
They are notes of encouragement before an exam, a confidence-builder after being excluded in a social setting, words of affection when there's nothing else to bring up. On the rare occasion when I make lunches, I write the napkin notes, intuitively knowing it is something I must do. (I try to be humorous or vulgar, lest I trample on my wife's territory and come off as inauthentic.)
I got to thinking about the napkin notes because our eldest, our son, graduates from high school this week and his final school lunch was last Wednesday.
Childhood slips away gradually, but from a parent's standpoint the end comes abruptly and the "lasts" cascade down on you like hailstones, each landing just as you shake off the sting of the previous one.
Our son leaves for college in California in August. I know he will return home many times before full-on independence, but we know from our own experience that it is never quite the same. Each time the young adult checks in, he will be more his own person and less the child for whom you drew pooping ducks on a napkin, knowing it would bring a smile.
Last week, I wondered how Amy would approach our son's last napkin note. If I had to guesstimate, she's written about 3,000 to him (maybe 2,000 to date to his little sister). The last one, she told me, was a low-key exhortation to enjoy his final day of school. She seemed rather nonchalant about it.