School lunch

Ray and I were reminiscing about school lunches over dinner this evening. Actually, reminiscing might not be the right word, as some of the lunch selections from elementary school were suspect at best. For example, Ray described "taco burgers" where the school was too cheap to buy taco shells or tortillas, so instead slapped some ground taco meat, cheese and lettuce on a bun. ("Oh, we had that...it was called Sloppy Joe's." "No, not Sloppy Joe's...we had that too, but the taco burger was different.") He also described a cubed-turkey curry dish that sounded worse.

I'm thankful we had neither of these selections in our school. I often longed to buy school lunches since I brought my lunch most days. However, when it was chili and cinnamon roll day ("Huh?! Chili and cinnamon rolls? I don't get it.") I would sometimes persuade my mom to give me the .75 or whatever to buy lunch. Chili and cinnamon roll day was the be-all end-all of tasty school lunchtime.

Anyway, all this reminded me of lunchtime during middle school. After eating in the cafeteria, which doubled as the stage in the auditorium, we would walk around the 1st floor halls in one big circuit. We'd pass by this tiny school store. Out of this little sliding window you could buy maybe 3 kinds of candy, pepperoni sticks, and I think pens, pencils and peechees, but that's it. Classmate John R. worked at the store at lunchtime, and it was a well-known fact that he'd hand out pepperoni sticks to his friends. I think he had a lot of friends at lunchtime.

Anyway, at the end of the year, whichever teacher was in charge of the store figured out that the pepperoni supplies just didn't match up with pepperoni sales. John reportedly had to pay back more than a thousand dollars in lost pepperoni profits.

I wonder if John R. is still embarrassed by this middle-school misstep, or if this was the beginning of a career of white-collar crime.