Hold the Cheese Please

The seventh and eighth grades are tough school years for anyone. In addition to the physical changes and growth spurt, adolescents acquire the ability to reason logically, manage abstract ideas, and connect between cause and effect.

Like most adolescent boys, I began to pay more attention to girls, avoided gang showers after PE at school, and wished that I had more money to spend on what seemed like important things at the time. Unlike other boys, I had a regular job, but it did not put any money in my pockets.

I spent most of the afternoons after school during the eight and ninth grades helping my mother make sandwiches. My dad managed a food vending company, and my mother made sandwiches for the vending machines on the kitchen bar in our home. During the day she would make the tuna salad, pimento cheese and chicken salad and get all the other ingredients together so that when I came home from school the two of us would make hundreds of sandwiches.

The “chopped ham” came in a long metal can about 15” long, and we had to slice the meat with a non-electric hand operated slicer. The processed cheese came in long packages about the same size as the ham, and it was thin sliced horizontally so that we only had to make vertical cuts about the size of the sandwich and then peel off the cheese slices.

There was a lot of incentive for me to go out and find another job when I turned 15 and could get my driver’s license. My pay for working with my mother was that I could eat all I wanted. To this day I hate processed cheese, any kind of tuna fish and any type of processed luncheon meat.

However, my “pay” left me with more than coins in my pocket. I have never known anyone who worked as hard as my mother and my dad. The work ethic that I continue to exhibit even in my senior years was instilled in me by my parents. My earliest understanding of profit and loss was working at the kitchen bar in our home making sandwiches for vending machines. Other life lessons were about food presentation, quality, freshness, how to properly store food, food sanitation, and on and on.

Let’s ponder all the small things that we learned from our parents and how much these seemingly insignificant lessons have influenced our lives, and then how we have unintentionally passed these on to our children and grandchildren.