The Everyday Sandwich
"Everyday I spend trying to keep the inexplicable from oozing out of the everyday sandwich I make." I wrote this in my journal in high school.
Sandwich as metaphor.
I'm 58. Give me the sandwich. Hold the metaphor. And for that matter hold the arugula. Hold the avocado, the sprouts, the chipotle mayo and even the tomato. Just ham + cheese + mayo + mustard on two factory cut slices of Pepperidge Farm 12-grain bread.
In early days of the New Year I had a sudden craving for just such a sandwich. And then, while waiting on line for the deli man to slice the pale pink Boar’s Head ham and almost flavorless domestic Swiss cheese, I asked myself "Why?"
There is the association with travel or rather, the anticipation of travel; the drab, mean sandwiches you get on trains and planes (if you can get one) are such a contrast to the new tastes you will sample when the train pulls in to the station or the plane touches down in Mexico City or Paris. The everyday sandwich also conjures good memories of doing good. It’s the kind of flaccid sandwich you get in a brown paper bag when you are canvassing for an election or chaperoning a 4th grade trip to the zoo. And it’s the sandwich your mother might have put in your own lunch bag before the days of artisanal horseradish pickles or chipotle mayo. Maybe there would be a note. My mom sometimes scrawled on the napkin, “I love you Zoo Zoo," or "Be Good!"
Finally, the everyday sandwich steadies me when I am beset by feelings of uncertainty and sadness. I think of the late Laurie Colwin and her paean to the consolation of nursery foods. When I got my craving my sister, Carol, and I had started the onerous process of getting my mother into a nursing home—one of the same awful places we visited when I sought respite in a cheese puff. This phase has been something I said I wanted, tired of managing the small village of aides it took to get my mother from her bed to her chair or to the toilet. I cried like a baby to Carol about having to tell our mother she would no longer live in her small expensive apartment, no longer have the aides at her beck and call, women who know her every mood and bowel movement, who can answer her craving for a ham and cheese sandwich. My sister was inexplicably calm--she who admits to feeling a gnawing guilt even though she is the closest to mom and the most giving. In our black humor about mom, we talk about "pillow time" and "brain bleach moments" but confronted with this phase, knowing what I know about these places and how my mother sank into herself, became unrecognizable during stints in rehab, I feel a surprising outwelling of love and concern for her. I, who never feel guilt, who nurses feelings of being hard-done-by, the one who sought love and attention outside the walls of our home because I did not feel it enough inside.
I'm 58, and as you see, I cannot keep the inexplicable from oozing out of the everyday sandwich I make. My daughter is 17, the age I was when I wrote so earnestly in my journal. I’m about to turn off the desktop computer we share. All night she has been going in and out of her room slamming doors, stressed over a glitch in one of her college applications, over a physics lab report. I see the Facebook message she has sent to her group of physics nerd friends "I'm in my high stress mode which is also strangely my sentimental mode. I love you all so much (heart emoji ad nauseum).
"Have a beautiful day, darling," the deli man said as he handed me my plastic packets of ham and cheese. And feeling strangely sentimental, not brusque and harried as I usually am, I smiled at him and said, “You, too, handsome.”