Mardi Gras: laissez les jaunes d'œufs rouler!

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. During catechism on Ash Wednesday we'd troop down to the church to have our foreheads smudged with ashes. If the smudges wore off, we could always freshen them with ashes from dad's cigarette butts. 

Back in those days, when we were orthodox, we couldn't eat meat on Fridays. Here is my recipe for a Pueblo Junior High Tuna Sandwich.

First,  if you're not in a hurry, take a can of tuna, drain off the oil, and empty it into a bowl. Then add some diced celery, a little minced onion, and chopped hard-boiled egg whites. Save the yolk to roll down the aisle in Mr. Baldwin's social studies class. Maybe this time he'll send you out. Add salt, pepper, and mayonnaise, and spread the mixture on crisp toast.

If you are running late, just mix the undrained tuna with mayo and spread it on bread. Stick the sandwich in a recycled Baggie, whose clinging power has been reduced by repeated washings.

Put some potato chips in another gappy Baggie. Put the sandwich, chips, and an overripe banana in a brown paper bag. Or a sugar sack, better. A sugar sack is sturdier and has stuff written on it so you can read it at lunch if you have to sit alone. It's lunchtime's answer to the cereal box.

Put the lunch in your locker. Between classes, pitch your social studies book on top of the bag.

At lunch, open your locker. It smells like you're standing next to Moby-Dick. Fruit flies have formed a deep and abiding relationship with the banana. Take your oily, squashed bag to the cafeteria. Sit down at a table. Marlene, who always laughs with her mouth wide open after swallowing most of her milk or cottage cheese, sits down opposite. Gross. But it's better than eating alone. 

Take out the oil-dampened sandwich. Try to chew it, but the best you can probably do at this stage in the game is just sort of mush it around in your mouth. Dab up the minuscule bits of potato chips, the major casualty in the encounter with the social studies book, with your fingertips and lick them off. Marlene thinks your performance is hilarious and laughs. Wipe her milk off your face.

Lick the banana off the inside of the sugar sack. Throw the banana peel and the bag into the garbage can. Save the Baggies for Mom.

After lunch, everything you touch will smell like tuna. By the end of the day the whole school will smell like a whaling vessel ninety days out of New Bedford. Everyone knows it's you. 

Think of death by embarrassment as your Lenten sacrifice.

Jellied tuna: tasty Lenten fare