By Amy Barnes
A woman in a gorgeous fall suit once handed me a package of uncooked hot dogs, in an elementary school hallway. Like we were spies exchanging slimy secrets. After hugging her kid, she ran out the side exit door, high heels clacking. There’s a parent discourse raging about room moms and parties. About who does what and why and how. And which is best or worst. About who is working and who is SAHMing. Money. Food. Teachers.
It was the week before Thanksgiving break, a half day. There was a Thanksgiving Hall Feast, because that’s what you did in public schools ten years ago and there was no lunch being served and no pre-packaged requirements. It was a joyous celebration day. Teachers hovered with curriculum-centered coloring sheets. I was in charge of the meat table. Note: don’t go to the bathroom during planning meetings or you’ll get The Meat Table. Everyone wanted the easy tables, the less expensive things like “Sides” or “Pie” or “Condiments” or “Paper Goods.” No one wanted “Meat.” I had a sign-up sheet full of people bringing meat. I brought meat. You might assume meat meant turkey or ham.
It turns out it meant: the remainder of a week’s shredded lunch meat in opened baggies, Lunchables with turkey slices in them, a box of Slim Jims, and the raw hot dogs. I had no alternate plan. There was no time to thaw and cook a turkey or go to Honeybaked Ham and spend $80 on a turkey. So, I did what moms do when there’s a Thanksgiving Hall Feast, and you need meat. I went to the cafeteria and offered my lunch lady friends the twenty bucks I had in my pocket for any and all meat they had. And to warm it up. And let me borrow their big knife to cut it because no one bought a knife. And did they have any juice for my other mom friend who had one flat of water for over one hundred kids? It was the last day before a holiday, and they obliged with whatever they could find.
By the time, the screaming (and thankful) crowd of kids made their way down the hallway, the Meat Table was full of leftover lunchroom bounty: pale turkey buried in pale gravy, the lunchmeat insides of pre-made sandwiches, piles of pepperoni slices, tiny squares of meatloaf, mystery meat sticks, 3-meat pizza, and – those hot dogs, boiled in a huge pot and sliced into medallions. The kids ate every last scrap. They didn’t care if it was organic turkey and cranberry sauce that had been boiling all morning. Although, they did love the cranberry sauce. They were hungry.
Why do I tell you this protracted story? Because THIS is also how I also did “writing” in those years when my kids were younger. I wrote service pieces on parenting, education, travel, and other things that were “what I knew.” It counted as writing, and it paid. But I also didn’t write fiction. I was living a weird Willy Wonka Hot Dog World of raw meat, IEPs, room moming, substitute teaching, and filling up a meat table. In a city with no family or support. Even though I wanted to write THE book or THE short story, it just wasn’t happening.
Why do I really tell you this protracted story? Because the part about writing fiction is a bit of a lie. I was writing fiction. It was in my head. The notes on characters. The notes on setting. Notes on food. I also started writing about food in articles. Where to eat. Recipes. Cookbooks. Nostalgia. I talked to the Smithsonian about early Thanksgiving foods. I also tell you this because I wasn’t not writing because of my kids. I wrote about them and parenting all the time. At the time, they were the stories I tossed at editors like a package of raw hot dogs on Thanksgiving Eve, because I was on a deadline and someone had accidentally stabbed a pencil in their neck or taken their Plague Doctor costume to school without warning anyone.
People I know have been surprised I finally or suddenly wrote books or had pieces published in literary journals or Southern Living. Moms that were at the Thanksgiving Hallway Feast look at me as if I have raw hot dogs in my hands when they see my books now (that’s a whole other discourse). Some of them have gone to Parnassus and bought a signed copy or checked them out at our local library. Of course, I bought their candles and cookware and leggings, so they do kind of owe me but some are genuinely interested.
I never saw that woman in a suit again. I still appreciate her. She was doing the best she could. The other parents and teachers were too. I was doing the best writing (and parenting and meat procurement) I could.
And in this essay, I shall talk about …
Read Amy’s other work here at Reckon.
Amy Barnes is the author of three short fiction collections: AMBROTYPES published by word west, Mother Figures at ELJ, Editions and CHILD CRAFT, forthcoming from Belle Point Press. Her words have appeared in a wide range of publications including: The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, Nurture Lit, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong Quarterly, Apartment Therapy, Southern Living, Motherly, Romper, Allrecipes and many others. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.