The Art of the Sandwich

 

A little over a month ago my oldest son, who is in 8^th grade, made a bold choice. He decided to switch from school lunch to bag lunch. A decision like this could have wide-ranging social ramifications. Is it uncool to bring lunch from home? Will you miss out on all the juicy gossip being exchanged on the school lunch line? Without access to tater tots, will you have the proper ammo to defend yourself in case of a food fight? I’m not sure if my son weighed all of these crucial questions, but I do know that one day, after eating a questionable school lunch burrito that came back up on him, he decided that it was homemade lunch from then on.

Of course, my son’s decision did not just affect him. Since I’m the one who gets my kids out the door every morning, lunch-making, which I have not had occasion to do in a couple of years, is my terrain. This means I had to find a timeslot in my morning routine to fit in this new task, and 7:27 a.m. to 7:32 a.m. seemed just right. Fortunately, I’ve made hundreds—maybe even thousands—of sandwiches in my lifetime, so it was easy to add it to my repertoire. Put a bunch of food between two pieces of bread, cut it in half, stick it in a Ziploc baggie, add a peach cup and a bag of chips and, voila! Lunch is ready!

So, every day I made the same sandwich for my son and somewhere around day five or six I got bored with the routine. On that day, as I started to cut the sandwich in half, I stopped about two-thirds of the way down and then cut the rest of the sandwich at a 45-degree angle, rather than in a straight line. Later that night—long after I’d forgotten I did that—my son brought it up.

Son: By the way, what was the deal with the sandwich today?

Me: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Hope it didn’t cause any problems.

Son: When my friend saw it, he just started laughing and said, “There is something WRONG with your sandwich.”

Me: Sorry. I’ll cut it normal next time.

Son: No. Just get more creative.

And with that exchange, a whole new sandwich making routine was born. Every morning since then, when I make my son’s sandwich, I try to be more creative than the day before. And every afternoon, when my son gets home from school, I ask how he liked his lunch and he critiques my work. Early on, I realized I had to up my game by using more than just a knife, so I asked my wife to point me in the direction of the cookie cutters. That was a game changer! Much easier to make clean circles with those than with a knife.

As with every true artist, at some point, you create your masterwork. For me, that moment came a couple of weeks ago when, in a moment of inspiration, I decided to incorporate the natural air hole in a slice of bread as the nose in a skeletal face, and the curve of the top of the crust as the jawline. When I finished making the sandwich I almost wept at the beauty of the thing and was conflicted when putting it into the Ziploc baggie rather than a picture frame.

That night I expected to hear rave reviews from my son, but instead I just got a, “Yeah, it was pretty good,” before he marched off to his room to play computer games. Crestfallen, I thought about giving up my art entirely, but then I remembered that we artists don’t do it for the praise, but rather for the love of the craft. So the next morning, I took out my knife and my cookie cutters again and got to work.

Every morning since, I have created a new design. Sometimes simple, sometimes complex, but always from my heart, using wheat bread as my canvas, I can truly say that I have mastered the art of the sandwich. (But man, I’ll breathe a huge sigh of relief when my kid goes back to school lunch.)