The poetry of a really good sandwich
I host a weekly faculty and staff writing group where I offer an optional prompt and people either write to the prompt, or simply use the hour we’re together to work on their own writing. The idea is that we all dedicate at least an hour each week to creativity and writing. This week, I took inspiration from this Substack prompt, called "Title First," titles being something writers usually end with and something with which they often have difficulty.
First, I invited the group to list as many wacky and serious titles for possible essays or poems or stories. Our collective list was playful and evocative:
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The poetry of a really good sandwich
The wings of love
The mystery of the pistachio shells
On renting
In the grand scheme of things
Pain is weakness leaving the body
Keep frozen
Careless whispering
Broken heel
The place where you go to find the thing that you lost due to general carelessness
It’s always in the last place you look
The efficacy of stop lights
We each chose a title and then wrote for twenty minutes. What emerged was magical. One person created an elaborate character who is tired of playing the villain (I learned that in pro wrestling, the “heel” is the bad guy); another wrote a micro essay on the amount of detail people often share about the woes of apartment rentals; yet another imagined a disgruntled toy store employee, who doesn’t want to care about his job, in the grand scheme of things, but is unable to let the minutiae of his job reorganizing the toys on the shelves irritate him.
I chose the title, “The poetry of a really good sandwich,” and riffed on it literally, by writing an acrostic essay, using the letters in the word, “sandwich.” Here it is:
The poetry of a really good sandwich
Sandwiches are my husband’s favorite food. Sandwiches and burritos. In college, his favorite sandwich was from the Bancroft café, on Telegraph Avenue. He told me about it when we met in Russia. The food in Russa made us miss lots of things back home. What’s your order, I asked. Don’t laugh, he said. It’s really plain and actually nothing special. It’s okay, I nudge. Tell me.
And then he proceeded to describe this very plain sandwich – turkey and Swiss cheese on a croissant. Was there even lettuce? If there was, I can’t imagine that it added very much because lettuce in croissants tend to wilt very quickly. Is the café special?
Not really, he said. I wondered if I would ever get to try this turkey croissant sandwich. We had just started dating. It was a summer romance. We were two weeks into the summer program and there were only six more weeks to go. But I already knew we would never break up.
Do you have a favorite sandwich, he asked. Traditionally, Taiwanese people don’t like to eat cold foods – like salads and sandwiches – the way Americans do. Cold foods (including cold water) messes with the qi in your body.
Well… I didn’t want to make him feel like his favorite food was uninspiring. I don’t eat sandwiches all that often. At my college, all the way on the opposite coast from his university, sandwiches are a last resort – only if they were served on a platter at an event and free for students to take. Or if we went on a school outing and sandwiches were in the brown bag lunch.
I suppose I like a PB&J, I offered. Taiwanese people like foods that are both sweet and salty, so PB&Js fit nicely into that category. In fact, peanuts play a significant role in my favorite food, lumpia, which, if I think about it, is actually a Taiwanese burrito. The first layer that you lay down in a lumpia is sweetened peanut powder. That is the most important ingredient.
Cilantro is the second most important ingredient. There is a dessert version of lumpia that is peanut powder, a bunch of cilantro, and three small scoops of ice cream all wrapped in a lumpia skin. In St. Petersburg that summer, I often stopped for ice cream on Nevsky Prospect. The ice cream came in boxes that the vendors would slice into a brick, which they placed between two thin wafers. I loved the way the ice cream vendors called out, marOOOOzhenaya.
Hearing the Russian word for ice cream reminds me of the summer I met my husband.