Topical Guide 278
Mark Dorset
Food: Onion Sandwiches
In his letters to Lorna from the hospital, Herb began to devote more space to matters other than business, including personal matters:
A lot of the other guys complain about the food, but I’ve had worse. We generally have boiled potatoes and onions, and sometimes we have rice or stew. Breakfast might be just crackers and coffee, but it wasn’t many years ago that I didn’t have any breakfast. Lots of times, when I went to school, for lunch I would just take a potato. Sometimes I’d have an onion sandwich, which didn’t make me too popular with the other kids! I used to sell papers on the street and also a thing that my buddies and I called rat pie. We got these pies at a bakery so we could sell them, and we used to joke that they were made of rat meat. I think all of us thought it was probably true. If a rat pie got wet in the rain or if somebody dropped one on the pavement, I’d take it home, and we’d have that for dinner. Many nights we’d have just potatoes. So I don’t mind this food at all. In fact, sometimes when we have just bread and onions I make an onion sandwich and it reminds me of home. The truth is, I like onion sandwiches. . . . I’m glad that the books are arriving on time. I’d be pleased if you would continue to write to me to let me know how things are going, if it isn’t too much trouble.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 6
When Guppa had finished reading the directions, he began reading them again, and I began turning on my stool and looking around the cellar. When he had finished reading the directions a second time, he began reading them again, and I began fooling around with the wringer on Gumma’s washing machine. When he had finished reading the directions for the third time, he straightened up and rubbed his back and then flipped back to the start again.
“You hungry, Guppa?” I asked. He turned to me with a look of some surprise, as if he had forgotten that I was there.
“Hungry?” he asked. “No, not yet, Peter.”
“When do you think you’ll want lunch?” I asked.
He looked at me and smiled. “Oh, in a little while, I guess,” he said.
“Maybe I should go upstairs and help Gumma make some sandwiches,” I suggested.
He looked at me for a minute before he said anything. “Maybe you should,” he said at last.
Gumma and I worked together on lunch. We made Guppa’s favorite, raw onion sandwiches, on toast, with butter. Gumma sliced the onions, as she always did, and she was a marvel to watch. With her old knife, worn by sharpening so that the blade arched upward, she cut uniform slices, with the precision of one of the women in the ruling room at the slide-rule factory. I got to make the toast, and spread butter on it, and lay the slices of raw onion on it, and I carried a tray with two glasses of milk and a plate of the sandwiches to the cellar. They were delicious.Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres”
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