Sandwiches: A Collage Essay
Hello! I’m back! I hope! The past 8 months have ground me up and spit me out over and over but I am off for the summer with new writing/reading goals and plans.
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The first sandwich I learned to make was grilled cheese. I was 5 years old and my family lived in New York. Not the city but a trailer park an hour north. I stood on a step-stool in our tiny kitchen while my mother hovered around me explaining the process—five pats of butter on one side of each piece of bread, a slice of American cheese, unwrapped from the envelope of cellophane, grill one side of the sandwich and then the other.
This skill came in handy when, just months later, my mother shattered her ankle.
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The term “sandwich generation” was popularized by sociologist Dorothy Miller in the article “The 'Sandwich' Generation: Adult Children of the Aging” which was published in 1981 in The Geronologist. In it, she describes the stress experienced by adults who are care taking children and their parents, who are stuck in the middle. The focus is on the elderly parents and the extraordinary lack of resources for both the elderly and the adult children.
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My husband and I took our toddler out to dinner at a local, well-established deli. As an east-coaster—not just New York, but also Philly—I love a good hoagie sandwich. A long tube of bread that is somehow both firm and soft, filled with salami, ham, cheese, crunchy lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and Italian dressing and I was looking forward to indulging and savoring this type of sandwich. But the deli only offered square sandwiches—no hoagies/subs to be found here. Still, it was a delightful outing. Our toddler is in his curious, exploratory phase and we were nervous about how he would do but he sat and observed and ate and garbled back to us as we engaged him in our conversation. The event was quotidian, uneventful but I hold it tight in my heart.
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Last fall, my father almost died. He’d been sick for quite some time and no matter how hard my sister and I and my aunts tried, we could not get him the help he needed. It was and is a complex situation and I don’t know how to write about it and yet it feels important that I try. This newsletter is about creating a new American dream when the mythologized version of it is outdated and unattainable; I am writing it from the perspective of “I”, the narrator as character, the essayist who is trying to make meaning. That person is different on the page than the person who has to deal with the reality and yet are the same person.
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When I teach first-year writing seated, on the second day of class, after I’ve cleared who has nut allergies and who doesn’t, I bring in a couple of paper bags containing various ingredients for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches1. White and wheat bread, crunchy and creamy nut butter, strawberry, grape, and raspberry jelly. Sometimes I throw wild cards in there—rye bread and macadamia butter and black currant jelly.
I leave the ingredients concealed and I instruct my students to take out a pen and a piece of paper and write the directions down for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. After several minutes, when I sense they are finished, I collect them. I set up all the ingredients on the front table and I ask a few student volunteers to come up. I hand them each a “recipe” and direct them to make the sandwich as instructed. They reach for some bread and a butter knife. I disrupt and ask, “what kind of bread is listed? Does it tell you to get a butter knife?”
The point of the exercise is to attempt precision and clarity in writing. To explore assumed knowledge, to understand subjectivity in taste and how our choices affect style and taste (even down to how the bread is cut).
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The American ideal is centered on family and family obligation. I want to maintain the privacy of my father and what happened but it also happened to me. It severely impacted my life— my little family, my job, my friendships. I am still dealing with the repercussions and I am facing what every memoirist faces; how to write about others whose story not only overlaps but takes over.
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The truth is—the first sandwich I learned to make was probably not grilled cheese; it was most likely the classic peanut butter and jelly. Wheat bread, grape jelly, and creamy peanut butter, all cheap grocery store brand. I used a spoon and not a knife until a friend in junior high pointed out that wasn’t normal; everyone else used a knife.
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I had no precise directions of what to do, of who to call to get the help my father needed; the help I needed. I’ve honed my ability to cold call and ask questions but I didn’t have language to know what questions to ask. He can’t eat? He needs help but doesn’t want it? My father’s situation was unlike any I’d heard of before. I had no script to follow. I fumbled through phone call after phone call; I emailed, “Hello! I’m just following-up on the email I sent this day and this day and this day. Can someone please email me back?”
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To be honest, I hate the term “sandwich generation”. In this context, I imagine an old, soggy sandwich; edible but no longer delicious. The bread has become gummy, the fillings stale and tasteless. It leaves a coat of oil in your mouth. You feel sad and unsatisfied. Can we stop propagating the term “sandwich generation”? Why not gemstone generation; a diamond, a ruby, a sapphire, jade created under pressure and heat? Is a gem too hard, too angular?
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My most memorable sandwiches—the first grilled cheese I made on my own. The grilled cheese and ham with a side of ranch in undergrad. The peanut butter and chocolate sandwiches made while floating in a canoe down the Mississippi. The grilled cheese made with cinnamon raisin bread, cream cheese, and sharp cheddar in grad school.
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My metaphor, this analogy fell apart a long time ago in this draft so I’ll end it here. I hope to back to writing in this space more regularly. In the meantime, may many good and satisfying sandwiches come your way.
Exercise from Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities by John Warner. It’s a phenomenal book about writing and while the title is very pedagogy focused, I highly recommend it to any writers. Warner points out in the book that one of the reasons writing is so difficult is because you have to think backwards (grammer, sentence mechanics) and forward (generating ideas) at the same time and that about just blew my little writer brain apart.