A two-week-old sandwich

Or making the permanent impermanent with minimal effort

It was the way he simply shrugged off the entire thought that has stuck with me. Like there was no reason to worry, not a care in the world to concern him.

It was just a sandwich, after all.

I should back up. My wife and children and I just got home from a 2+ week visit to our family in Ireland. When we departed, we picked up sub sandwiches for dinner in the airport. You know how airplane food can be - sometimes it goes just fine, other times you open up that reheated tray and stare into the face of something completely inedible. And with young kids, unpredictable meals are a one-way ticket to crankyville. No thank you.

Maybe I should be grateful that neither of my kids likes mayonnaise or mustard or any other spreads or sauces on their sandwiches. But they do like deli meat and cheese, and my youngest son’s sandwich certainly contained those items. He ate half of it in the airport terminal while we waited to board the first plane.

It’s exciting, getting on an airplane, riding off through the night, knowing we will see family members we’ve been missing for four years (thanks, global pandemic). He did his best to eat half the sandwich, and then we wrapped it back up just in time to board the plane.

“You can eat that if the dinner they serve isn’t something you like,” I assured him.

“Got it,” he nodded.

I don’t remember what meal he got, but it definitely had a chocolate pudding treat included. We watched movies, played games, tried to sleep in the seats that don’t recline. It was a good flight by all accounts, especially when I compare it to prior flights when the kids were much younger and harder to keep occupied for 9+ hours of sitting.

Plane staff came around at sometime in the middle of the night bright and early before we landed in Dublin and provided us with breakfast sandwich things. They were nightmarish.

Allow me to elaborate - I can eat just about anything. I ate unidentifiable seafood in Japan when I was in middle school. I grew up on government cheese and canned everything (so you know flavor isn’t an essential requirement of a diet). Spicy food doesn’t scare me. Haggis is on my bucket list. I’m not wild about the notion of eating insects, but if you made pancakes with cricket flour I’d still try them. My best friend even had me taste a sardine-flavored candy cane recently (it wasn’t bad, really).

But this breakfast wrap thing was so bad I could only make it through two bites before I put it down and closed the box.

And my son watched it happen in utter horror. If his dad wasn’t going to eat that thing, there was no way he was opening the box. So he asked for his sandwich from the night before.

Okay, before you accuse me of poisoning my child with deli meat that had been left out for 8 hours, I’d like to remind you that the airplane was as frigid as the troposphere in which it traveled. And the air was so dry anything left out was a desiccated husk of its former self. The sandwich was a way safer bet than the breakfast item they’d handed out.

He ate two bites.

Honestly, I just didn’t realize that he rolled it back up and stuffed it into his own backpack before we got off the airplane. I was exhausted, we were all shuffling stuff into packs and negotiating crowds dropping bags from the overhead bins onto us, and I needed to pee.

Two weeks later, as we were getting the final items into our checked luggage and figuring out what the kids wanted in their carry-on bags, our sons’ granny asked him what snacks he wanted for the flight home.

“Oh,” he made a pensive face, “I’ll be fine with my sandwich.”

“Your sandwich?” she asked. “Did you want us to make you one?”

“No.” he waved her off. “It’s the one from the trip out here. I’ll just eat that if I’m hungry.”

My wife gave me ‘that look.’ You know the one I mean. ‘That look’ means…

1. What’s he talking about?

2. Go upstairs and check his bag.

3. I cannot believe that you let him put that sandwich into his backpack and didn’t throw it out the instant we got here.

4. Omg you’re in so much trouble right now.

I made the trek up to their room alone. His backpack was under the window. Internally (I’ve learned the hard way) I had a conversation with myself: “I’ve been in this room multiple times each day during our two-week visit. I would have smelled a rotting sandwich ages ago. I have a great sense of smell, especially for mold. No way did he get this one past me.” I opened the bag and fished around with one hand. Fingers jammed up against a paper-wrapped bundle. I froze.

When I pulled the sandwich out, I knew better than to unwrap it and look at the carnage. I carried it downstairs knowing that I was defeated, that I had failed as a parent, as a guardian of all things good and wholesome (and not rotted). The bread was so stale and hard it was impossible to squeeze. It was a wheat-a-brick¹.

“My sandwich!” he cheered as he watched me trudge into the kitchen. We had a little talk about food safety at that point.

What I can’t let go of is just how sold he was on that sandwich being ready for him when he was ready for it. And if you think about it, that’s probably a reasonable way to see the world when you’re 8 years old and not in charge of cleaning out the refrigerator ever. Maybe my kids are just too spoiled to know what ‘spoiled’ even means. And if that’s true, then I’m guilty of it and totally okay with the outcome.

You trans friend,

Robin

PS - He still wanted that sandwich on the flight home.

1. Weetabix is not the same thing as shredded wheat, just in case you thought that. I did too. I was really, really wrong.