One day, investigating a stench concentrated in my room – perhaps on a humid summer day – my mother found a stash of rotten lunches in my toybox. She was angry with me for having hid food in there and just letting it rot indefinitely, but she was more confused than she was angry.

I don't know why I disposed of the uneaten lunches in that way – why I didn't just throw them in the garbage.

What I do remember about those lunches is that mine sucked, and I was envious of what other boys at school got every day, especially Josh. He got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on fluffy white bread. (I got the pb&j but we didn't usually get that good "Noopy bread".*) He would have a small bag of Doritos, a, juice box, and some kind of pre-packaged dessert. Sometimes he would get chocolate milk from school. I usually had an apple in addition to my sandwich and I don't remember the rest. And I did throw away the leftovers** after I ate whatever parts I liked. I may have just eaten the sandwich and had my carton of milk. I am pretty sure that I had to always get white milk.

But the lunch help announced one day: "We better not catch anybody throwing food away!" That may not be a quote. That's what I feel like she said. So I morphed – a pattern I would maintain in life. I didn't have to abide by what the standard really was – eating what was given to me and not wasting a precious resource. I could just find a solution that would enable me to do what I wanted, and what I wanted was to eat only the things I felt like eating.

That sounds kind of silly now. My head told me just now that I was a picky, spoiled kid. My head told me, "Well, that's how pretty much all kids are 'nowadays'." My head told me that I had turned old, talking like that. Yeah, but eat what's put before you. My head defended itself and said that's how I raised my kids, and look at how they eat! (They aren't picky; they don't have to be embarrassed in front of others; I was so picky as a kid and I was embarrassed about it. I was always running into food I didn't like. I was anxious about eating lunch at a new friend's house. I didn't want to be "shamed" for being picky. [I'm not sure that I was ever shamed at a friend's house. I may have gotten a, "YOU DON'T LIKE THIS?!" or a "Wow, you're really picky." Which, to me, doesn't mean that I was shamed, though I felt ashamed.]) That was a long defense.

This hiding was much bigger than lunches.

Anyway, it always seemed to me like we would all be happier if we just stopped caring about what everybody else was eating and focused on what we are going to eat. And I suppose we have gotten a lot closer to that compared to when I was a kid, though there are still those enclaves of food-care – school lunches, WIC, breakfast, fatherhood. I was so upset when I found out that my oldest child was throwing lunch away because it wasn't the Hot Pockets and Lunchables that all of the friends were getting. I was angry. And forgetful.^

Perhaps, though I don't know why I was throwing lunches away in my toybox, I can ascertain why. The thought process may be irretrievable, but I can guess at its shape by recalling –
We better not catch anybody throwing food away!
Mine sucked.
I was envious.
I morphed.
Trying to get away with throwing them in the trash at home would never work.

And I do know why I didn't just defy my mom insistently and without relenting, telling her, "No! I will not eat what I don't like!" (Even though she knew that at home. That was not so much defiance as the fact that almost everything actually grossed me out, and on the rare occasions when she would try to force me to eat something, I would gag so hard that she would start to gag.) I was scared of her. I didn't want to "get in trouble". My mom didn't even ground me, except maybe once, but that's vague enough that it might just be my imagination. What it really was was that I didn't want to get screamed at. That was a terrible possibility. It hurt how far away it was from when we were sweet, when I adored her.

When we first moved back east from California, having a room apart from my mom's made me miss her at night. I don't know whether we shared a bed when we rented the room in her friend's house or when we had the cute, little trailer in cute, little Mayberry, but it seems that we must have, because I used to sneak into her room every night after we moved to Woodward. I would crawl, oh so silently, out of my room, turn her handle as quietly as possible – I had to get it wrong to get it right, making too much sound with the first touch of my hand on the handle or breathing too loudly – I had to morph, and it took time to get it right – crawl up into her bed (this is where it got more difficult), and I would have to try to transfer my weight into the bed without depressing the mattress too much and waking her, like Indiana Jones stealing the statue and replacing it with a sandbag. The hardest part of all, though, was that I wanted to get close enough to her to smell her hair. It was comforting. It was my blankie if I ever had one. And I know full well that a Freudian or neo-Freudian or quasi-Freudian or pop-Freudian would have a heyday with this, but I just know that –
All of my family was the two of us.
My first four years of life were in a tiny space with the rest of my family.
And she was my comfort and my home.

Sometimes I would get lucky enough – no! I mean, I was skilled enough – to make it into the bed and fall asleep with her hair in my hands. Most of the time I got kicked out and yelled back to bed.

Actually, I think it is most likely that she just let me come in sometimes because she knew what I was doing. She told me many times in later years how much it hurt her heart when, after having moved so far away from California – from the world I knew and a time when we were together so much – I said to her, "I hate it here because you're always gone at work."

My mom made me clean out my toybox and I was embarrassed and ashamed. But honestly, I was confused, too. It wasn't until she asked me, "WELL WHY DID YOU HIDE THEM HERE? DID YOU THINK THEY WOULD JUST GO AWAY?" that I realized
Oh. They don't just go away, do they?***

It took me about 38 years to have my condition cleansed at the side of the pool. The waters were troubled but I was saved by a word instead.

I had been hiding lunches all my life until I lost enough of what I had once adored, my mother included. My mother more than anything else, perhaps. It may not feel great even when it doesn't feel bad. It seems to me that, more often than not, cleaning out the toybox is uncomfortable because it is a whole bunch, and what do you do with your own discarded (things)? The apples will turn into dirt somewhere, and we can't throw everything away on somebody else's property.+

*Butternut bread used to have Snoopy on the package and that is what I called it when I was really little. Mom and I kept it up and that became its permanent name.
**Which is everything you don't eat. It seems like it is supposed to be kind of a last little bit – I just couldn't quite get it all down comfortably – when really, it's just everything you didn't eat.
***Though if they are there long enough they will compost into dirt. You just have to stop adding new stuff to them.