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Buffets.  Who can say when and where it started.  We were brown baggers growing up.  No, wait, that’s not entirely true.  We were walker homers for lunch for grade school.  Wait, that’s a lie too.  Most of the time we walked home from school for lunch.  If we knew the weather was going to be OK.  But in Oswego it snows for about 6-9 months so you can count on bad weather, but my mom was tough, like superwoman linda/nell carter tough.  Like oldest of 9 kids tough.  Like raised 3 boys tough.  Because she was a tough mama and because she wanted to see us and we wanted to see her when she could (she worked 3p.m-11p.m at the hospital) we mostly walked home for lunch.  Occasionally however, we stayed at school.  This meant a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on “bug bread” brought in a brown paper bag.  We had to bring the paper bag home with us to re-use.   Before it was hip to recycle my mom was washing out Ziploc bags because she believed in wasting not.  I’m pretty sure that during my K-6 years at St. Paul’s Academy I never went through the buffet/lunch line at school for hot lunch.  Not even on pizza day.  Why spend the money?  My mom made bread, every 3-4 weeks she made something like 24 loaves of the heaviest, heartiest wheat bread that man ever came in contact with.  She poured cups of sunflower seeds, poppy seeds, sesame seeds you name it, it was in the bread.   The seeds looked like bugs…you get the picture.

 Anyshoe, by the time I got to Bishop Cunningham for 7-12 I had never walked through a buffet/lunch-line.   And bringing your lunch in junior high or high school was absolute social suicide.  My brother Mark was a senior when I started 7th grade, so while this bought me a certain amount of cool by relation I wasn’t going to muck it up bringing in a crumply re-issued brown paper bag w/ a thick and meaty PBnJ.  There I was 13 and completely uncomfortable in my skin and had to make my maiden voyage walking through a line where Mrs. Kells was offering me food out of some large trough.   Everyone else seemed OK with this.  I on the other hand was starting to sweat and get blotchy.  There were hair nets, plastic gloves, big trays of mushy food that had been sitting for who knows how long resting over steaming dirty water. 

Immediately I figured out ways to get around this.   I was a dancer and all the girls in class were already talking about being fat and having to lose weight.  After class they traded diet tips like, just drink milk at lunch, or what became my lunchtime meal for 6 years a yogurt and rice cake.  This of course was null and void on grilled cheese and tater tot day.  Nothing could ever be wrong with grilled cheese and tater tots.  It didn’t matter if they were served on a buffet or on Fr. Chester’s bare stomach.  So every day of school I bypassed the buffet and Mrs Kells passed me my yogurt and rice cake and I sat with my friends and munched happily.  No one could say anything to me, I would just say my dance teachers told me to lose some weight.  Blame it on them.  And it’s not like I was one of the girls who were putting Ipecac in their Pepsi at lunch so they could puke up the 4 french fries they ate.  I wasn’t that whacked out.  And this was before anyone was using words like eating disorder and if you said that to me anyway I most likely would have replied with “why don’t you step the fuck off! ” and bitch slapped you!  I was a fairly angry teen.  Probably because I was so hungry.

 Flash forward to 1 year ago.  Beth, Megan, Carlo and I take a day trip to Atlantic City.  Awesome.  We eat fluffenutters on the way and listen to the Gnarles Barkley Album.  When we get there, it’s everything we want.  Kind of sad and dirty and creepy and filled with the best people watching we’ve ever encountered.  And there’s the ocean and the boardwalk.  After we get in the water and walk in the sand and walk up and down said boardwalk.  We take pictures in front of the Hooters and we ride the Ferris Wheel and Roller Coaster on the Pier.  Then it’s time for lunch.  I think we’ll go to one of the crummy old man bars and eat something fried.  Or maybe a pizza joint or hot dogs.  All of these are fine options.  But no, Megan and Beth desperately want to go to one of the casinos for prime freak show watching and the buffet!  They love the all you can eat idea.  Ahem, ahem.  Oh boy.  I can’t really breath.  So I just come clean and tell them.  Buffets give me panic attacks.  I don’t know why but there it is.  They laugh and whether they take me seriously or not I don’t know but the next thing I know we’re on the escalator heading towards the dining area at the casino.  This part is blurry, we pay, we go through a turnstile we get hot plates in our hands.  Megan, Carlo and Beth are filling their plates with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, pasta salads, potato salads, Caesar salads, carved meats, Stromboli and shrimp.   A lot of shrimp.  I walk at a safe 1.5 feet from the table and survey the contents.  I feel the sweat dripping down my back, between my breasts.  I pick up a roll and a pad of butter and the tears are stinging my eyes.  I go back to the table and the waitress would love to know if I would like a drink.  I order an ice tea in a cracked voice, put down my plate and sprint to the bathroom.  I hyperventilate and mini pace in the stall making the automatic flusher go off every 30 seconds.  After my usual pep talk of “You can do this Lex!  You ran a marathon!  You hiked Mt. Washington!  You can eat food from a buffet!  You survived giardia!  You can eat some fucking Stromboli!”  I head back to our table, defiantly pick up my plate, march up to the buffet, take a piece of pizza, triumphantly return and eat the motherfucker while tears stream down my cheeks and my friends cackle and laugh at me.  And I laugh too because I know I’m ridiculous.

Fast forward now to two weeks ago.  The hospital threw my mother a big dinner and dancing bash for her retirement.  She worked as an R.N in the Labor and Delivery unit for forty years.  I’ll get to the glorious and emotional speeches that were given in my mother’s honor at another time.  For now we have to talk about how I was thwarted by the American Foundry of Oswego, NY.   We were told salads would be served at 7p.m.  This to me means sit down dinner.  So I am breezy at this party.  I’ve got a million greetings to make as there are dozens of nurses and doctors I haven’t seen in years who were very influential during my formative years.  At 7p.m exactly a nice woman walks up to Bruce and I at the bar and says, you can take your seat now, we’ll be serving the salads soon.  We do as we’re told.  We’re sitting at the head table with my mother, father, two of my brothers and their wives.  All my nieces and nephews are at the table next to us and the other 75+ guests are in surrounding 8 top and 4 top tables.  We eat our salads and chat and are having a lovely time when that very same woman comes up to Bruce and I again.  I’m not sure why she keeps coming to us until this moment.  She is the messenger of death.   She puts a hand on each of our shoulders and says “The buffet is ready and your table is first.”  I inhale sharply, turn to Bruce and say “BUFFET????”  He has a similar issue with buffet and asked me about what type of dinner it was going to be no less than 3 times prior to the event.  In the car I reassured him that salads being served at 7pm which meant to me, sit down dinner, he agreed, we were calm.  I know, I know, we’re a match made in a Lysol disinfected heaven.  So,  “BUFFET?????” He is a quick thinker, Bruce, he grabs my hand and says “It’s OK, It’s totally OK Lex, you know why?  It’s OK because we are the FIRST TABLE, we are the first table and you know all the people at this table!” 

This is total bullshit and he and I both know it.  But it’s my mom’s night and I am not going to go hide in the bathroom tonight.  Bruce and I start walking up to the beastly table with the rest of my family and he is again trying to keep me calm by talking about something.  Again, a blur, something about skate-park design and the Cayman Islands.  He keeps trying to put his hand on my back and let me go first because there are less germs that way I think.  I keep trying to step behind him, subconsciously so I can dart out the door.  I breath deep, swallow my fear and take the hot plate from his hand.   “It’s bigger than you Lex ” I think, eat the food at your mother’s retirement dinner.  I take 3 pieces of soft broccoli, a chicken breast and a roll with butter.   I watch Bruce hem and haw at the various trays of food and choose some rice and chicken.   It’s true, there’s strength in solidarity.  If he’s gonna do this then so am I.  It was a great party.

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