The Institution of Lunch
It’s midday on Sunday and its an overcast day out here in northern San Diego County. I just got a text (actually a What’sAp text) from my friend and colleague in Palermo. He sent me pictures of his first family outing in the car for nine weeks of the nationally imposed lockdown. The picture was of the Carabinieri stopping the car to ask questions and search it. He said most shops are still closed and there are limited places you can go, but it was, at least, a chance to get the kids out to see their grandmother. This is where we are in life and while it varies based on your locale, the concerns and the risks are global and universal. I saw an AARP monthly newspaper that very clearly delineated the priorities that we must all stay focused on. I liked the obvious broad categories and fully agree with them:
1. Your health and safety
2. Your money and financial wellbeing
3. Your life
The part that was so succinct and yet said it all was the third point. Health and money are not life. They are the necessities that make life possible. The Chinese numerical Proverb of the one in front of all the zeros doesn’t work so well when there are two things to put up front, but the idea is still the same. The third, life, is not very possible without the first one first and second one next. Beyond that, anything is possible and anything can be made flexible and adjusted to meet the circumstances.
My Mexican gardner, Juventino, and his helper were here today. The main task was to move those four yards of Arizona river stones off my driveway and into the large bed on the right side of the front of the house, matching the one on the left side of the front of the house. It was an optional aesthetic task, so it belongs higher up on the Maslowian hierarchy of needs. It is my statement that life will indeed go on and I will care about how my house looks and feels to me as I roll forward from this focus on the pandemic lockdown. I suspected it would be at most a half-day’s work, but I wanted Juventino to just do it, take a full day’s pay for him and his helper and then be on his way to enjoy the rest of his Sunday. He is such a hard worker that he had completed the task by 11:30am. I paid him and told him to go home. I finally had to go out and stop him from doing more of the endless chores in the extensive cactus garden. It was past 1:00pm and he was thwarting my good intentions of giving him a full day’s pay for a half day’s work. I literally had to chase him home. The only way I knew my cries of “sufficiente!” were taken in the spirit offered was the small smile on his otherwise weathered and expressionless face. I admire the man immensely. He remains my symbol of hard-working immigrant respect.
By the time I told Juventino to go home, it was past lunchtime. My wife, Kim, and I have this arrangement with regard to meals. I am genuinely unsure who decided and preferred that she would cook and serve me dinner most nights. She says she likes to cook, and that seems borne out by her love of entertaining. I am always quick to suggest ordering in and when she feels like not cooking, she takes me up on it. But many times, like last night, I suggest giving her a night off and she prefers to cook dinner. I know many of my readers, those of the female persuasion in particular, will find it wrong of me to allow Kim to cook and serve me, but I genuinely feel she wants to do it both because she likes cooking and because she likes being of service to me somewhat and sometimes. It is very possible to abuse this arrangement without any awareness. Kim can be in a less than ideal mood (not often, but possible) and I may or may not recognize it acutely enough to push the order-in option. This program, which is fairly firmly established for dinner is non-existent for breakfast. I get my own breakfast most days though once in a while she asks me about eggs or pancakes. I probably bat about .500 on that since I am only occasionally interested in a big breakfast.
But lunch is a confusing meal. Until moving out here and simultaneously kicking into Coronavirus WFH schedule, I would always arrange my own lunch out or skip it altogether. I would guess in the last two years I skipped workday lunch one third of the time. I used to think of lunch as my favorite meal of the day. It always seemed so carefree and pleasant to me. Starting fourteen years ago when I had a lapband installed, it became less wonderful (as with most meals) since I could not eat most of what I was served. Well, today I asked Kim if she was planning to make lunch or should I make it for myself. While I don’t really cook at all, making lunch doesn’t involve much cooking. She told me she had just made herself a protein shake so she and I were on different meal schedules. I was ready to throw in the towel since after a certain time of day, I view lunch as having passed its window. She then offered to make me a bowl of leftover turkey chili.
I like to think of lunch as being life. It is neither a matter purely of health nor of finance. Lunch is the meal of variability that is neither practical like breakfast, the purported most important meal of the day. No one ever accused lunch of such importance. Dinner is a serious affair. It is either the soul of the family, the gathering spot of grace and the hearth, or it is the venue for networking and business that costs more than it should and perhaps yields more than expected. But lunch is very much at the discretion of us all. We can schedule it or ignore it. We can skip lunch or savor it as the all-important break in an otherwise busy or oppressive day. “Let’s have dinner”, is a serious invitation and requires a commitment. “Let’s have a drink”, works for some due mostly due to the optionality it affords to either exit or carry-on. Given that I do not drink, it is more troublesome than not since not imbibing is often awkward and somewhat impolite, especially if you have accepted an invitation to do so. Meeting for breakfast, while I have done it many times, is actually quite presumptuous and aggressive in a way that implies an invasion into what should be a personal preparatory time of day.
Lunch has no delusions of grandeur and there is nothing formal or presumptuous about it. It is intended to be a time of ease and pleasantries. I have always believed that lunch is more effective and appropriate for business, relationship-building, networking, camaraderie and just plain pleasure. Lunch may be one of the most important moments of the day. It is when we are at our best whether we are morning or evening people. Lunch is life and life and lunch are what we make of them. So let us not ignore or take either lunch or life for granted. This Coronavirus time has given us all cause to pause and reflect about all manner of things and life and lunch are a good place to start. I declare lunch an institution that needs full and due consideration.