The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": The Corridor of the Undead

Friday, September 18, 2009

The Corridor of the Undead

It's like a rite of autumn around here: the back to school nights in schools, with nervous teachers explaining their policies and parents sitting there smiling, silently judging them.

I used to be the teacher up there; now I'm the parent. I try not to judge them. Last night, I got there five minutes late (which is pretty good for me) and I had to stand next to the cafeteria doors. I think all cafeterias look the same in schools everywhere - something like this:

with the student area resembling:

although that is a much nicer cafeteria than I remember from grade school. I remember broken benches and stains that we all decided were from some gruesome event that had befallen previous students -

of course, there is generally someone who looks like this:

encouraging you to eat the meal that looks like:

The sinks in my daughter's school are large enough to slaughter a cow in. And the kitchen is made of cinder blocks with dancing vegetables smiling from the walls. The onion looked a little like Osama Bin Laden.

The evening opened with a speaker from the county health department. You can bet I was listening to a forty minute presentation on the H1N1 virus. I only heard the part about 91K being spent on installing hand sanitizing stations. So then, swine flu is a virus that isn't airborne? I didn't quite get that, then again, while she was speaking, I was imagining the onion with a turban.

I can't think of a whole lot of writing that has taken place in school cafeterias, yet it's an experience we have all shared. More so than say sports which I completely bypassed in high school - yet there are lots of books out there involving sports or where the protagonist is involved with a sport.

I had forgetten all the memories I had of my grade school cafeteria until I stood in front of the window last night. I remember a lunch lady standing over me when I tried to slide an untouched lunch into the garbage can. She stopped me and ordered me to try a Swedish meatball. I was in the second grade and she was straight from the corridor of the undead. She picked up my fork and held it up to my mouth. I was too scared not to eat it, so I swallowed it and nodded, then ran. To this day, I have never been able to try Swedish meatballs.

I also remember a tremendous amount of gossiping at the lunch table. We exchanged notes, hair barrettes, phone numbers and party invitations. That time, even though it was probably only about forty minutes a day, was the best time of the day.

I'm trying to think of children's books that involve the cafeteria. Is it one of those places that you stop remembering once you get past college age? I can't think of a single title...

7 comments:

Elizabeth Bradley said...: Oh Anne, you had me laughing, especially with: the onion looked like a little Osama Bin Laden.

I think that same lady worked in the cafeteria back when I was in grade school, she made me eat a forkful of carrot and raisin salad. Shudder...; Friday, 18 September, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Remember the spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and the pats of butter catapulted onto the ceiling?

The protagonist of my WIP loves cafeteria food and thinks it's great when her mother lets her have the school lunch.

And I must be hungry: that lunch photograph you've got there looks great. Maybe I've just spent too much time on the WIP. Or maybe it's time for me to give up on my diet.; Friday, 18 September, 2009
storyqueen said...: Anne, you have GOT to check out Jarrett Krososcka's new Lunch Lady series. I probably spelled his name wrong, but his blog is www.thejjkblog.blgospot.com (or something like that).

Books are funny!

Shelley; Friday, 18 September, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: There's only one lunch lady I think, Elizabeth - everyone remembers her no matter where they went to school. I think she exists like Santa.

Yup, Mary - all kinds of food on the ceilings, and occasionally the walls if they were nearby.

Get off that diet! Go have some chocolate to bring your senses back -

Thanks, Shelley, I will go check out his blog. Cafeterias make for such great settings I'm amazed there aren't more.; Sunday, 20 September, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: *shudders at those pictures* Mostly I remember the lunchroom smell--cold, unappetizing, a mixture of cleaning supplies and hot dogs. Barf. Then again, my memories of lunch were refreshed during my student teaching a few years ago. School lunchrooms are nothing but evil to me now, although I do remember enjoying lunch when I was in elementary school. (In middle and high school, I skipped lunch and hid out in the library.)

I can't think of any books specifically set in a school lunchroom, although there is a Junie B. book partly set in one.; Monday, 21 September, 2009
Adrienne said...: Here the kids eat lunch outside, thank goodness. Those cafeteria pictures made me a little queasy.

I think the Arthur books, Captain Underpants and the Wayside School all feature the cafeteria occasionally. The lunch lady in Wayside is Miss Mush and she serves Mushroom Surprise (which tastes like hot dogs and grape jelly).; Monday, 21 September, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: I was a huge geek, so cafeterias were the source of a lot of emotional trauma. This may explain why all of my books have at least one cafeteria scene.

I am so tempted to put a dancing onion in one of them now.; Wednesday, 23 September, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***