The Indulgence of the Open-Faced Sandwich

When I started high school, my dad was still making my lunch. My dad is a creature of habit – the type who, even though I am making an omelet mousseline for breakfast, even though I am going to the trouble to prepare blackberry compote and a delicate dusting of powdered sugar, serving it with frothy, nutty coffee and sliced fruit, will proceed to eat Cheerios before I have a chance to even separate the eggs. “Dad, I am making breakfast!” I’ll say. And he’ll say, “I know, I’ll eat it! But I like my Cheerios.”

So, every day for my first few weeks of high school, I would pull that same sad, squished sandwich out of the Ziplock bag, with globs of Smuckers smeared along its sides, holding the sandwich hostage. I would take as many bites as I could stomach, and throw out the rest (I deeply regret all the sandwiches I wasted those first few weeks of school, sad as they were to me). I don’t deny that in many ways, I am a picky eater. It’s not that I won’t eat snails, because I most definitely will, but I hold various foods to various standards. These sad sandwiches were my first understanding of this facet of myself. So, after one sad sandwich too many, still unable to fully articulate precisely what was so sad about it, I asked my dad to please stop making my lunch. I immediately took total agency over my sandwich existence. I picked out my own bread in the supermarket. I came to understand the subtle difference between putting the jelly and the peanut-butter on separate pieces of bread versus putting the jelly directly on the peanut-butter. I discovered raspberry preserves and almond butter and in what ratio to put each. Learning to make my own peanut-butter-and-jelly in the very precise way I preferred it was my first real experience with setting my own gastronomic standards.

But sandwiches are funny entities. They are fluid, and have this unique ability to manifest into whatever is needed at that respective time. You cannot eat an omelet mousseline in the car. But you can certainly put some eggs on two slabs of toast and enjoy it on your way to work. The start of school, the return to a consistent-and-usually-urgent rhythm, really crystallizes the fluidity of sandwiches in all their various forms. It really makes tangible just what that extra slice of bread indicates. For the month of January, I worked from home as a freelancer. I was able to roll out of bed, smear some butter on my toast and place the runny-egg right on top, an open-faced sandwich. I would slit the yolk gently with my knife, allowing it to bleed onto the white porcelain plate with all of its sunny-side-up glory. I could stab the bread with my fork and then run it slowly through the fantastically yellow beads of yolk. And most indulgent of all, I could take as much time as I wanted to do so.

Am I dramatic if I describe the shift back to the reality of school as violent? I am consistently needed somewhere by 9 am, which is not “early,” per-se, but more often than not, I can’t wholly enjoy breakfast before nine, and why bother eating if I am not enjoying it? I have been re-resigned to sandwiches, wrapped tightly in paper-towels and tinfoil, moderately squished and necessarily uniform temperature. And there is virtue in these sandwiches, undoubtedly. There is virtue in being able to enjoy something without excess instruments. No utensils necessarily. There is also nostalgia. I owe a lot to closed sandwiches, enjoyed without frivolities, because in them, a deep love for cooking was inadvertently fostered. But with every bite of my jam sandwich, I feel a deep, undeniable longing for the essential indulgence of eating an open-faced sandwich with a fork. And so begins another semester.