Out to Lunch

I’ve been thinking and writing about death lately and decided that before I become my subject matter it would be advisable to vary the menu. With this is mind, I started to think about lunch, that wonderful pause in the day’s occupations that allows me to take a break from digging among the euphorbia out the front door or in the garden of my memory. For roughly the last 420 days, the midday meal has been whatever leftovers lie in wait in the back of the refrigerator. But I have a long history of going out for lunch and I’m yearning to get back to it. Every day in junior high in the fifties, a friend and I would toss the brown paper bags dutifully packed by our mothers and walk over to Columbus Avenue to hit the pizza parlor. I would get plain or mushroom, the wonders of sausage not yet known to me, and carry it through the raucous streets, dripping hot off the waxy paper down my chin and all over my hands. I looked forward to its salty, garlicky flavor all through general science, the final period of the morning, and lingered with its last bites until there was just enough time to race into the girls’ bathroom, dense with Marlboro smoke, and wash up before algebra. In high school on 135th street, they didn’t let us out of the building at lunch, but once I got to college, I repeated my seventh grade routine, refusing to eat in the dining hall on my already paid-for meal card and hanging out instead in the coffee shop, a preserve of defiant, entitled bohemia.

Eating out in the evening would be a pleasure, but let’s face it going out for dinner is an undertaking. It involves decision making…where to go, what to order…forking over considerable amounts of money, and maintaining patience while the waitstaff disappears into the kitchen yet again and comes out with someone else’s food. Lunch is straightforward. You know you want a salad or a tuna sandwich and you know it won’t dramatically impact your solvency, although nothing is as cost-effective as the cream cheese on date-nut bread at Chock Full’O Nuts of your early work life. In recent years, lunch has become primarily a mechanism for sitting with a friend across a table moving your mouth to form words while she moves hers to eat her omelet, then switching places. There are people who try to eat and talk at the same time which sometimes results in bits of egg migrating down the chin, recalling your infancy in a highchair or at least your adolescent adventures with pizza.

Meeting a friend for lunch is a brilliant exercise in regulated sociability. It generally has a time limit when one or the other person realizes she’s late for her a date with her mechanic or the people waiting for a table begin to glare in your direction. You and your friend are sitting in a public place, which means you have to keep your voice down no matter how misguided the other person’s politics might be. At the same time, the feng shui of the situation dictates that you basically look at each other for the duration. Sitting opposite one another borders on the intimate. You can’t get up and walk around the way you might if you were in your own house or hers and you suddenly felt restless or outraged. Even the phone, that enemy of civilized discourse, is more under control in a restaurant. Most people understand that they need to let go of the impulse to glance at it surreptitiously every few seconds and this, in itself, is a sign that the apocalypse may not be as close at hand as we fear.

In the last year plus, I have missed going out for lunch more than I care to admit. It’s as close as I get to hanging out, the way we used to spend days, weeks lying around doing nothing but taking a shot at growing up. Gossipping, forming opinions, dissing our mothers, loving each other in our messy, unformed way. Now, even over sandwiches, there are topics that need to be covered. My grandchildren, your grandchildren, my ailments, your ailments. But sometimes during these nooners, there are moments of flight when we look at each other past the salt and pepper shakers and feel a twinge of joy, a leap of faith.