Cream Cheese Terror

0809blog

I will explain why to this day, I fear and abhor and keep my distance and do all I can, with all of my might and fight to my last breath, to avoid cream cheese and jelly sandwiches on white bread and for that matter, any sandwich with the edges cut off.

But first, a few thoughts about grammar school, especially the three-ring binders that everyone had and the little white reinforced paper circles that you glued on the three holes of the blue-lined white paper so that the paper wouldn’t rip and wreck your blue-lined white papers with a series of multiplication exercises that took an hour to do and so they couldn’t go flying away, far from your reach, leaving you flabbergasted.

We all had pencils and little clear plastic sharpeners but the problem was the sharpeners tended to sharpen one side of the pencil more than the other side. So then you had to turn the pencil and sharpen the other side and soon your pencil was two inches long and very difficult to use for those multiplication tables. If you were accomplished and experienced and lucky enough to sharpen the pencil to a uniform point, it often would snap off the first time you pressed down hard on paper and you were back to square one.

Some people had separate erasers but most of us relied on the erasers on the tops of the pencils. Trouble was, as the pencils shrunk from use, the erasers on the pencils wore off, leaving the metal that held the eraser all alone on top of the pencil and if you tried to erase an error on the multiplication table, the metal on the pencil would tear the paper badly, leaving you flabbergasted.

There was a time when we had fountain pens. With the old kind, you dipped the pen in a small ink fountain, then pulled this little piece of metal from the side of the pen to suck the ink into the pen. This often worked well although there were times when the ink fountain fell off the desk and made a real mess.

We graduated from ink fountains to pens that contained small cartridges filled with ink. When the ink ran out, you just replaced the cartridge, if you had any extra cartridges with you and most likely, you didn’t and sometimes the cartridges didn’t work.

The next iteration of ball point pens were for the older kids who had graduated from pencils and fountain pens. The worst thing was when the pen leaked ink and it showed through your shirt pocket or when you reached in your pocket for the pen, finding it had leaked and your fingers were covered with ink, making you look really dumb as you tried to hide your hand so people wouldn’t see it.

We got our books the first day of school and the first assignment was to cover them, though I never really understood why. At home, we cut up large brown, trash bags and folded them like origami to cover each book while other kids got ready-made book covers made of plastic and with colorful pictures of Roy Rogers or Lassie. This was way before anything called backpacks so we had to carry a pile of books to school every day and it was not easy, especially if you had to balance them on the front basket of your bicycle or if it rained.

Some kids had lunch buckets with Roy Rogers or Lassie on the sides and some even had those really neat aluminum thermoses with the removable cup on top that the mothers of some lucky kids filled with juice. I was not one of the lucky kids but instead I brought lunches in a brown paper bag to school which was marked with my name so that my sister didn’t accidentally take it. And I got a small container of milk from the cafeteria to wash down the sandwich.

And you know where I’m going with this. Sometimes I grabbed the wrong bag out of the refrigerator because I was in a hurry and I didn’t look to see my name and I would open it at lunch time expecting my typical strawberry preserves and creamy peanut butter sandwich but instead finding the wrong bag with the dreaded, cream cheese and jelly on white bread.

I like cream cheese but not with jelly. It’s like washing down a hamburger with milk or washing down a sandwich with soda. Or having cereal for dinner. There are some things that you don’t do. Cream cheese is fine with bagels but not with white bread. It’s like having a PB&J on a bagel. No way. Or like having green, mint jelly and peanut butter on rye bread. Or any kind of liver. Yechh.

These are universal truths that we hold to be self-evident and that had profound effects on all of us throughout the rest of our lives.