A 33 Year-Old Jalapeño Sandwich

I re-read a post on Indian Food Rocks this morning and it made me think back to a time in college when I went on a geology field trip. The author (who's name is Manisha) wrote the post about her daughter encountering difficulties with her classmates who made fun of her for the "funny" food she brought to school for lunch. Her daughter hasn't yet reached the point of feeling comfortable telling the other kids to take a hike. I'd personally love to hear about the girl explaining to her classmates that their lack of maturity and intellect is "your problem, not mine, thank you very much, and I happen to enjoy chutney-cheese sandwiches far more than I like rancid peanut butter!" But that's not what this post is about.

What I recall about that field trip, for reasons unknown, is that I had damn near nothing in the apartment to eat. And I had absolutely no money to buy anything. But I had to take a lunch, for it was an all-day field trip to a geological formation quite a distance from Austin. I rummaged around in my pantry and refrigerator and came up with the only thing I could: a jalapeño sandwich. I used all I had to make my lunch: four pieces of dark rye bread, slices of the three or four remaining pickeled jalapeños and carrots in the usually-full Tupperware container in the refrigerator, and the tiny little bit of mayonnaise left in the jar, spread on the bread.

Actually, this was not a particularly unusual sandwich for me, though I usually didn't eat it for lunch and I made it a bit different than normal. I'd make jalapeño sandwiches for snacks when I came home from class for the day, but I used white bread instead of rye (for some reason, the white bread tended to tone down the heat of the sliced jalapeños) and I added iceberg lettuce for some added mass. I really liked those sandwiches! In fact, I mayhave to buy some white bread and some iceberg lettuce just to see if I still like them, now that I'm thinking about it.

Back to my story. For this field trip, out of necessity I made an unusual version of my snack, with dark bread and without the lettuce. Once I made those two sandwiches, my place was utterly and completely bare of food. I went on the field trip and, at lunch time, I sat with a girl whose name was, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, Patty McClung. As she and I talked, she expressed a fascination with my sandwiches. I don't think it was a fascination as in, "may I have a bite?" but, instead, it was a fascination as in, "is this something you'd usually eat?" For some reason, I felt proud that I had brought something unusual for lunch, something no one else brought.

I'm appreciative that my refrigerator and my pantry are no longer so barren. I don't recall what I did for dinner that night, nor when I was able to replenish the larder. But I still remember how my "choice" of a field trip lunch made it easy for me to talk with Patty McClung. We became friends for the remainder of that semester, but I lost track of her after that. I wonder if she remembers the boy who brought that unusual lunch on the field trip.