The Potatoland Diaries - Chapter 9

DAY 8 — April 2, 2007

"Lunch boxes"
The men folk all have the same kind of lunchbox.

They are dark green, plastic coolers, about the right size for going on an overnight camp-out with three or four friends. And they have a really neat lid that holds a manly-looking metal thermos on top. The lunch boxes are often brought to them by their wives, well before coffee time, which happens after two or three loads of potatoes, around ten o'clock.

I never get tired of Jim saying "coffee time!" It's not just the promise of respite from the rumbling hoard, or the thrill of the carbohydrate-laden delights that Mare might serve -- I also like the way he says it. "Coffee time" sounds so 1950s to me. It's kind of refined, in a way. It implies a nice little home-baked spice cookie and a bit of innocent gossip.

It sounds like maybe I should fix my hair a bit (not that such a thing would be possible, since, A. I learned after the first day that you may as well wait to shower until AFTER you are caked in potato dirt and, B. for the past two hours my hair has been plastered down under a hat that I made out of a boiled wool sweater).

Anyway, "coffee time" sounds nice. "Break time" might imply cigarettes, small-scale gambling, going to the can, and possibly even sneaking a beer, but "coffee time" adds a layer of pink gingham to my world of dirt clods and tuberous aberrations.

Usually, like clockwork, one of the wives arrives doubly laden with a thermos-topped green lunch box and a steaming plate of cookies or something. (Do they use some instinctive wifely storm-sense to know which of them is bringing the baked goods, or do they call each other on the phone the night before?) But on the occasion when providence doesn't offer baked goods, the guys dig in their green lunch boxes for a piece of leftover cake, or whatever.

At lunch time, I watch the men get out their sandwiches. They usually look like the traditional construction worker style sandwich -- salami and the like. (All except for Matthew, who, as I explained, receives a hot, three course meal served family style, in clean pickle jars.) Tom eats his sandwich on a hoagie bun.

I try to grab a spot on the bench that will provide enough space for the arrival of the Jason family, and delve up to my armpit into the red mesh bag that serves as my lunch courier. The rat-chewn looking hole in the bag's side is evidence that I had been too impatient to open it from the top when it had first entered my life as a sack of oranges. My sandwich is pepper jack cheese on some gnarly specialty bakery bread. From its looks, I could have baked it myself, but it probably doesn't fool Joyce or any others in the "just baked it" family.