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Poverty in a Sandwich
Even Kids Know Who’s Poor
When I was a kid, I knew the difference between the “regular kids” and the “poor kids” in our tiny town. Or so I thought. There seemed to be no “rich kids,” at least when I was in elementary school, which should already tell you that I was among the more privileged. But I still hold that we were not wealthy, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, there were differentiators that were detectable even to an elementary child. There were the lunch tokens, for starters. Green lunch tokens were for regular kids, and blue were for free and reduced lunch. Although I didn’t possess that terminology at the time, I just knew that the blue tokens were for kids who didn’t pay like some of us did. Now that I think about it, though, I harbored a certain jealousy for the kids who were allowed to pack their own lunches, and I suppose I thought of them as rich, with their Twinkies and Oreos and homemade peanut butter sandwiches while I had to eat what the cafeteria dubbed a “pizza burger,” which was really just pizza sauce, a single pepperoni, and some mozzarella on an open-faced hamburger bun. And on Fridays during lent, those makeshift pizzas were stripped of even the single pepperoni.
I made friends with a girl named Mindy in elementary school. I won’t use her last name, because that’s just cruel. She was nice most of the time, though we…
