Mom's daily bread - An Irish American Mother's Day story

One sunny Mother’s Day, my younger sister Anne Marie and I took our mom to lunch at Patrick’s Pub here in Pittsfield, MA.

When the check arrived, Mom’s hand darted out for it, beating our own.

I tried to extract the bill from her grasp. “Please, leave that to us. We must owe you for a thousand lunches.”

She refused to relent, and went back to chatting with my sister. But as I sat there, I began to calculate on a napkin exactly how many lunches we did owe her.

For starters, there was no lunch program at either St. Charles or St. Joseph’s, where Mom’s family of eight attended school. Therefore, 180 school days a year times 12 years equals 2,160 lunches per child. Times that by eight and we’re talking 17,280 lunches. Tack on lunches for her five sons who caddied at the Country Club of Pittsfield—a constant for many years from April to November—and we have an additional 400 lunches for each. Now we’re approaching 20,000, and that doesn’t include Dad’s lunches for 20 years while working at St. Luke’s Hospital.

Over a pint, I fell into reverie about my mother’s noonday meals.

“Boys, don’t forget your lunches!” Mom would shout as we scampered off to school.

We’d run back and collect them off the kitchen table, each identified by a single letter—J, K, and D—for her three middle sons, Jimmy, Kevin, and Dermot, penned neatly on the bag’s bottom, although the contents of each were identical. 

When the 12 o’clock school bell rang, our Sisters would eat at the old Victorian convent across the street, while a “lunch girl,” a pupil a few grades ahead, would have her meal at Sister’s desk, while trying to keep the peace amongst unruly pupils.

The lunch girls would call us by rows to collect our milk. The milk, which cost three cents, was cold and smooth, and it came in a round-lipped, six-ounce glass bottle with a cap and crimped cover from Crescent Creamery. One year, the bottle caps depicted the U.S. presidents, and we collected and traded them. To this day, I still remember that Millard Fillmore was our thirteenth president, and Benjamin Harrison our twenty-third. Considering the small number of textbook facts I retain from school, it’s truly astonishing that this dubious duo survives in my mind.

Mom’s lunches weren’t anything special. Standard fare might be a peanut butter and jam sandwich, with tuna fish on Fridays and the occasional egg salad or banana sandwich tossed in for variety. Pretzels or potato chips were a rarity. Fresh fruit was unheard of.

Dessert also held few surprises. Always two cookies—Fig Newtons, Sunshine Hydros, or Vienna Fingers—from first grade to twelfth. On Thursdays, when the pantry was crying for provisions, we might get two graham crackers mortared with butter. Believe me, a Thursday lunch of deviled ham and graham crackers was a trial, especially when gazing longingly as your classmate devoured an inch-high Fluffernutter, capped by a twin-pack of pink Hostess Snoballs!

Our meals were wrapped in waxed paper that we could dispose of daily, but we had to bring home our brown paper lunch bag, or dire consequences would follow. Folded into eights, the bag would fit nicely into your back pants pocket. After a week or two, it would only take a reverse yo-yo flip of the wrist to fold the bag.

Of course, it was embarrassing to save our lunch bags while most kids tossed theirs away without a care in the world. But a crisp, new bag would only be issued when the old one had to be carried by its bottom. Some kids had lunch boxes with pictures of the Lone Ranger and matching pencil boxes to boot. But they were in a league of their own, rich beyond our comprehension.

Besides our modest lunches, we’d often find bits of verse written in Mom’s spiky calligraphy; poetry memorized from her Gill’s Irish Reciter at Ballagh School in Co. Roscommon. When the winds howled bitterly outside our classroom’s tall windows, and it was comforting to be indoors rather than out in the cold, I’d flatten her small notes, brush away the crumbs, and read the words inscribed by her neat hand. These Irish verses would skip across my mind like flat stones, dimpling my imagination. And like those former presidents, there are many I still recall, like the lines from “An Old Woman of the Roads,” by Padraic Colum:

Oh, to have a little house!

To own the hearth and stool and all!

The heaped-up sods upon the fire,

The pile of turf against the wall!

Perhaps it was Mom’s way of bringing her schooldays to our own, to connect us to her mist-laden island an ocean away. Or maybe she simply wanted to make her plain lunches special. Funny how I never gave much thought to those little scraps of verse until that very meal at Patrick’s Pub.

I felt my mother’s warm hand cover my own. “Have you gone dreaming with the Guinness?”

“Oh, no,” I reined in my thoughts. “I just figured that you’ve made over twenty-five thousand lunches for your family over the years. So, please, let us pay for this one.”

“Twenty-five thousand lunches,” she gasped, covering her mouth with her napkin. “Well, you can pay for this lunch, so,” she cheerfully surrendered the bill. “But, indeed, you best hurry up with the others.” 

*Kevin O’Hara is the author of “A Lucky Irish Lad.” Visit his website at TheDonkeyman.com.