Forty Years Behind the Lunch Line

The cards

I kept her cards, and I started my own.

Every September I would write a new one for every kindergartner who came through my line. Name, birthday, and whatever I noticed in the first two weeks. It went in the green box, alphabetical, and the box grew until I had to move it from the drawer to the shelf.

By my last week there were two thousand nine hundred and some cards in that box. I know because Verna counted them once on a slow afternoon and would not stop talking about it.

Most of the lines were small. Doesn’t like peas. Lactose, ask the mother. Left-handed, give the tray on the left.

Some were not small. Mother in the hospital. Dad overseas. Lives with grandmother now. Hungry Mondays.

That last one I wrote more than once.

I never told a soul what the cards were for, and I will tell you now. They were so I would remember. A child can tell when a grown person remembers him, and it is not about the food. A child will walk through a line a hundred and eighty days a year for six years and never say a word about it, but he knows who knew his name.

And every year on each child’s birthday, I did one thing.

I took a hot dinner roll off the pan, stuck a single candle in the top of it, and set it on the child’s tray. A plain white candle from the dollar store, the thin kind that bends if you look at it wrong.

I lit it with a lighter I kept in my apron. I would say, “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” low enough that only the child could hear. Then I would say, “Careful, it’s hot.”

That was all. No song, no announcement. I did not want them embarrassed. Some of them had never had a candle in anything at home, and a few of them looked at that roll like I had set a diamond on their tray.

Summer birthdays I saved. On the last day of school in May, I would pull their cards and light all the candles at once, and for those few minutes the lunchroom looked like an altar.