A Lunch Story

by Justin T. Winokur
Stowe Middle School/Homeschool, Grade 7

Here’s the thing about lunch:

No matter where you have it, where it came from, or where it is going, lunch can always have two outcomes. No more. No less. You can have a good lunch or a bad lunch. And depending on these two outcomes, you can either have a good day or a bad day. Nothing else.

See, lunch is such a pivotal part of our day that if we do not get to enjoy it, we do not get to enjoy the rest of our meeting or the rest of our drive home from a vacation or the rest of our revolution of the planet. Lunch, in fact, is so important, that many people refuse to go without it.

A very simple observation is that no one wants to survive without lunch.

• • • •

Another thing about lunch:

There is no real “lunch time.” In fact, you could have lunch anywhere at any time – there is no written rule prohibiting the eating of lunch at 12:00 at night, or 3:00 in the morning. But the interesting part is that we, humans, have seemed to designate lunch as somewhere between 11:30 and 1:00. Perhaps, that is so we have enough room in the small space of our stomach for the next meal, being dinner, or so that we don’t overfill ourselves from the previous meal, being breakfast. And maybe, because lunch is so set and standardized in its time, we are only allowed half an hour of lunch after working hard so that we work harder to get to dinner.

And the people who eat lunch are just about as varied as the lunch items themselves – in fact, I find it quite amazing how many people eat lunch who are so completely different from each other yet seem to bond over the meal. In my entire time observing this ancient practice, many years, I have never really found out why people group so closely over that one meal. Though, sometimes the bonding is not regarded as a normal bonding experience. An example of these variations is a miniscule meal that I observed in the year 2006, between two workers. There was a small emotional debacle between these workers, which happened to be the most common and human debacle ever seen – one worker loved the other, and the other did not.

This poor worker who seemed to have fallen in love with the other worker was named Allison Black. She had no middle name, due to her parents who had decided that they wanted their daughter to be different. So they cut her identity short.

Allison had graduated from Washington University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering. She had been interested in math and machines since she was six and a half years old – at that age, she had gone to the Boston Museum of Science with her family, where she saw hundreds of contraptions and whirligigs. They had towered above her head, spinning and emitting sounds no human could try to imitate, with lights flashing, gears spinning and meshing together.
It was almost as confusing as the human mind.

And oh! What magical thoughts they gave her. She constantly had a pencil and paper after that, always drawing and scribbling and doodling wherever she went.
Sometimes when she showed her parents a particularly complicated sketch, they smiled at the cute six and a half year old and called her “our little da Vinci.” She dreamed up magical inventions that broke the laws of physics; Rube Goldberg machines with many steps and contraptions that slung milk cartons hundreds of yards.
By the time Allison was fifteen, she had a collection of thousands of sketches, and was increasingly interested in physics. She would spend hours in her room, studying, studying, building prototype machines out of wood, dreaming up crazy new things that she hoped just might work.

In fact, she found that particular milk-slinging sketch under a pile of books in her college dormitory. Then she built it, and she did sling a milk carton, and it did go hundreds of yards, and it did burst, white foamy liquid spouting high into the air, arching down onto the grassy ground, and she did smile with all of her companions who had helped her build it.

But when she graduated, she found it harder to get a patent than she assumed. After all, most companies had no use for a massive milk slinger comprised of quite a lot of PVC pipe. So she went on a job hunt, and turned up a small job at a tiny corporate factory called Frederick-Harley. They manufactured PVC, which I found to be quite ironic, and it was her job to keep the machines going.

And soon after she got the job, she fell in love with Charles Kloyst Taag.

Charles was German by heritage, and had a great-grandfather whose name was Deltlef van Taag. Deltlef had fought with the Nazis during World War II. He had a son during the war, and soon afterward he was blown to bits by a stray rocket, fired accidentally by his best friend.

Charles had never liked engineering. He had leaned towards math and its solid facts. He had managed to earn a spot at Cornell, where he received a Master’s Degree in Mathematics. And although he had hoped to become a great researcher, he ended up as an accountant in Frederick-Harley.

Mr. Taag, as his boss called him, was very popular around the accounting firm. He was amazing with numbers, and had a strategic mind that allowed him to handle money extremely well. He managed to organize Frederick-Harley’s money very neatly, possibly due to his minor case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Luckily the OCD wasn’t a big part of his life, and the only evidence of his problem was his perfectly tidy workspace and home.

Although it is not important to the story, I find it interesting how his apartment is organized. Once you step into the door, if you walk in clockwise circles around the kitchen, the living/dining room, and the bedroom, all items in his house are counted down from A-Z.

Mr. Taag could also dance. He could dance like hell.

• • • •

When Allison sat down with Charles, it was 11:36 on a Thursday. Charles had managed to make a very neat bowl of pea soup with a small sourdough roll, which he had packed tidily into his lunch bag. Allison had ordered the hot lunch, which on that day was a macaroni casserole that smelt of tomatoes and burnt pasta.

The first thing the engineer said to the accountant was what I now understand is the most common lunch greeting in the human language. “Hello,” was the word. Charles, being his kind self, smiled, although he was dying inside to wipe up a small bit of cheese hanging from the side of Allison’s bowl. This was not the fault of his OCD – even I, in my ethereal state, wished that I could reach over and flick off the food. And I would have too, if my hand wasn’t so intangible.

Many things happened over the course of the conversation. Most of them threw Mr. Taag off, and most of them made Allison think she was progressing. It’s sad how, now that I’ve lived a life of my own, I can see the many mistakes people make in their own lives without even realizing it. And then I remember my mistake, and how I never realized it until I was killed by lung cancer at the age of 72.

Mr. Taag was causing Allison to swoon merely by being his own clean self, and he was not realizing it. In fact, he could only focus on how disgusting Allison looked when she ate her macaroni casserole, and how very disgusting it smelt. He had never really met Allison – in fact, the only time they had seen each other and talked one-on-one was at a small meeting during which Harley wanted to get a new machine to make the PVC custom colored. Harley had said that the clients did not enjoy making things out of such an ugly beige, to which Allison had replied that she could not stand such an ugly beige. Charles had then pointed out to her that they did not have the money for such a useless tool, and the meeting ended.

I’m almost positive that meeting is when she fell in love with Mr. Taag.

Back to lunch:

The same pattern of impress and un-impress continued for around fifteen minutes, until the bell rang loudly. Allison got up and Mr. Taag got up. Allison smiled, feeling that she had had a small success, and Mr. Taag smiled weakly back, hoping to get as far away from this disgusting person as soon as he could.

The two returned to their stations and Allison engineered and Mr. Taag accounted, and both of them had growing feelings for each other. Just, unfortunately, not in the ways either of them hoped.

And it’s funny how I never realized such desperate romances had ever occurred in my factory over such a trivial and important thing called lunch, by two not very special people. And I smile when I think that my grumpy co-founder of Frederick-Harley, Mr. Harley himself, had sparked such inevitable anguish between these two mostly normal people. Had it not been for that meeting, none of this would have happened. Had it not been for lunch, this would not have happened as well.

One last thing:

The company did decide to buy the PVC painting machine anyway.