Peanut butter sandwiches
I liked it best when they got squished in the bottom of my oversized (or perhaps I was just undersized) backpack. It was an L.L.Bean backpack embroidered with a strong but not quite menacing shark and also with my initials for an additional fee. It wasn’t so much that I liked sharks, I actually didn’t care for them any differently than any of my other non-favorite animals, but I wanted a blue backpack and it only came with a shark sewn into it. And then I had two sharks, one on the backpack and another on the matching lunchbox. Everything we had growing up had to be matching, even if it meant I then had two unwanted sharks instead of just one.
But I didn’t actually care that much, and the lunchbox did its job: it was flimsy enough to squish my peanut butter sandwich to the perfect amalgamated consistency by lunchtime. I didn’t like jelly (which seems crazy to me now, a child not wanting to put more sugar on their sandwich) but maybe it was just that I liked the peanut butter so much that anything else would just contaminate it.
My dad liked jelly on his sandwiches. Sometimes if I found him packing his lunch for work the night before, I would offer to make his. I’m sure it was cute (his six- or seven-year-old daughter wanting to help) but maybe not quite cute enough to ruin the sandwich’s important ratio. Even though I didn’t like to eat jelly, I was mesmerized by its clear, sloppy structure. It seemed like putting jewels on a sandwich, even though jewels didn’t taste very good. I put a lot of jelly on my dad’s sandwiches.
But my sandwiches had just peanut butter. My mom made them on white bread, which now seems like a missed opportunity to get me to eat more whole grains or fiber or whatever is good for your growing child. I didn’t even like the white bread, not because I didn’t like whole grains or the healthier option, but because it went stale in the drawer faster. The sandwiches ended up crumby and dissatisfying at the end of the loaf, and that led to the squishing. If it hadn’t happened by natural causes, I did it myself, applying one palm directly to the unsuspecting bread in its plastic baggie until it was a delicacy.
We switched to wheat bread at some point to avoid the dryness problem all together; it seems to stay fresh longer by some magic unknown to me. There wasn’t much need for squishing after that, but still no room for jelly. A perfect peanut butter sandwich never needed it.