Mrs. Young and the Tower Builders

It's hard to equate humor with the image of a grade school cafeteria. A more appropriate word might be chaos or carnage. As an adult the image of a bunch of grubby-handed kids stuffing food into their mouths doesn't exactly fill me with glee. But, I do have memories of a few humorous episodes that took place in the school cafeteria when I was a kid. One of those episodes involved my second grade teacher Mrs. Young.

Mrs. Young was about thirty years old, I guess, although to second graders she seemed downright elderly. She was very prim and proper and demanded that her students be polite, respectful and grateful at all times. One of the things we were required to be grateful for was our food; you know, all those starving kids in China. Anyway, everyday as we lined up to go to lunch Mrs. Young reminded us that we were to be grateful for our food and that she expected us to take a bite from every thing that was placed on our trays. This meant, of course, that we were to take, at least, one bite of everything even if it were green, mushy, smelly or coagulated.

Now, I was a good little girl and always eager to please but I must admit that even I sometimes pushed my food around so it would look like I had tasted it. And it wasn't like Mrs. Young wasn't watching, she was. She spent the entire time walking up and down between our tables peering at our trays. She stopped frequently to prod some poor kid into tasting the broccoli or a dried up piece of ham. She never stopped at my place though so I guess my good little girl image coupled with my food-pushing scheme must have worked.

One day Gerald and James two of the rowdiest ,if not the smartest, boys in our class decided to see who could build the biggest, tallest mashed potato tower. As they feverishly piled potatoes up in the middle of their trays they added in other stuff as well. Things like peas and corn and spinach and gravy. They were happily constructing their masterpieces when, suddenly, Mrs. Young appeared. We had all been so focused on Gerald and James that none of us had seen her approaching.

For a moment time stood still as we all slowly realized the boy's fatal mistake. Then Mrs. Young silently reached over and picked up two forks from the table. She wordlessly handed one to each boy. As the rest of us filed out of the cafeteria Gerald and James were hunched over their trays learning to be grateful the hard way!