Heart of Darkness

For the past two weeks, my daughter has been fretting over her school lunch hour.  It's the first thing she mentions when she wakes up and the last thing we discuss at bedtime.  She hates it.  She gives a detailed account of her lunchtime fears every day, starting with the harrowing trek down the dark and crowded stairwell to the dungeon-like cafeteria where hordes of kids are screaming, crying and sometimes, though seldom, eating.

After a half hour of this pleasant experience, they're set loose on the playground.  Sounds fun, right?  Wrong.  There's nothing to actually play with on the playground.  It's just a glorified patch of concrete. They can't even play hide and seek because it's a completely barren landscape.  And to top it off, there are no teachers there to supervise, just three aides who've been there since the dawn of time.  Good God.

So today I hung around after drop-off so that I could train to become a volunteer lunch lady.  I've had Adam Sandler's 'Sloppy Joe' song in my head all day, along with visions of Chris Farley leaping around in a hair net.  Walking down the dimly lit steps to the basement cafeteria, my heart started racing.  It brought back all of the terror I felt at lunchtime when I was a kid.  I hated all of that chaos.  I still do.  I could totally see where my daughter was coming from.

As I descended into the bowels of the school, I felt like Charles Marlow nosing his way deep into the Congo wilderness.  It was rather disquieting.  I was entering my daughter's own personal version of the Heart of Darkness.  Poor kid.

As the three lunch ladies started their presentation about the toil and trouble associated with lunch and recess, I pictured them gathered around a cauldron like the witches in Macbeth.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm sure they're lovely ladies, but they're hard.  These are some seasoned, no nonsense Brooklynites, let me tell you.  After the training was over, I saw them all huddled together smack dab in front of the school smoking their heads off before soldiering back down to the cafeteria to handle the mob of agitated kindergardeners.  For the rest of the day I had Kurtz's final words echoing through my head.  The horror.