I had lunch today in the lunchroom at the office. I carried my lonely little salad across the office and sat down at a table in the lunchroom. Already eating, I looked up when someone sat down at my table and, to my surprise, I had no idea who they were. By the end of hour, however, we had become fast friends. It has made me think today of university, those golden hued days of memory, of setting out for university, those lonely terrifying first weeks when you are anxiously approaching each day worrying if you will succeed at school but more so worrying whether you will find a new circle of friends, the terrifying exhilaration of living away from home for the first time, so many firsts, first year, first dorm, first friend, first groove. Today in the lunchroom I couldn’t help but be reminded of the dining hall at my dorm at school. I remember those endlessly high brown brick walls, the abstract art on them, placed more to fill the space than for any artistic merit, the rows upon rows of Formica topped tables, collapsible chairs repeatedly filled by the hungry and just as quickly abandoned, forlorn until being refilled, an endless cycle of meetings and break ups, all encircling food.
Now as a food lover, the dining hall was a heavenly place for me, even if the food wasn’t always first class. Our food provider was named Beaver foods, not an auspicious start to a culinary experience since typically the only beavers I came in touch with were lifeless and smashed on the side of the road. But I have to admit to falling in love with the endless parade of new dishes presented to the weary, the hungry, the aimless student class. I also came to recognize the patterns as we saddled up the trough as the semester progressed. Hip of Beef, unfortunately presented on the sign advertising it with an apostrophe leading to colloquial references to hippo beef, was Thursday’s offering, breaded nondescript fish served Fridays, Monday were leftovers not so cleverly disguised as Shepherd’s pie. Always there were the faithful offerings of fries with gravy, soups of last night’s vegetables. While on holidays even now, I am instantly transported back to school whenever I eat a sandwich sold in a plastic triangle container. You know what I mean, a sandwich, mass produced with egg salad or tuna or roast beef and hard, processed cheese, served cut diagonally, its innards splayed forward at which the world can gawk, its crusts pointed back into the plastic corner, and then the whole thing covered in vacuum sealed see-through plastic like a window-adorned coffin with the drapes pulled aside. I ate endless sandwiches presented to me thus and that bread always had a slightly stiff texture, as though it had been embalmed with formaldehyde, a corpse of a sandwich rather than a fresh one.
But it was the companionship of that hall that amazed me. It was where you made your first friends, over a plate of spaghetti. It was the first easy place to take a roommate from your dorm or friend from class when your friendship wasn’t yet strong enough for a restaurant or a movie, your uncertainty with them and your conversations was covered by the noise of the dining hall. It was a cheap first date with that special someone, a place where you could both escape from a bad date easily, where going Dutch only involved swiping your meal plan card, where again any awkward silences were covered by the din of the hall. I remember friends who I would see every day, but only ever in the dining hall, never in dorm, never class, never out of class, only in the dining hall, friends of circumstance, routine, class schedules and shared tables. But there were part of the fabric of that place, as much as grey hippo beef congealing in gravy or the constant scrape of chairs being pushed back. Today’s easy conversation with a work colleague I had never met over a salad brought from home in a plastic Tupperware container reminded so strongly of the old days, when making friends was as easy as swiping your meal plan card, scraping back a chair, plopping down your plastic tray covered in food your mother would never prepare for you and launching into conversation.
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