It was a typical lunch break for the Fitch Middle School teachers of Team 8-F, sometimes called the upstairs team, since the other eighth grade team had their classrooms downstairs in A-wing.

We used to joke that we were upstairs because we taught upper-level classes. In fact, the kids were divided pretty much randomly.

Like the other team, we had a social studies, science and math teacher, all males. We also had a male student teacher. Our math support teacher was female as was our language arts teacher, Deb Swanson-Guth, who sometimes referred to herself as our den mother. The second floor also housed home economics, guidance and health, but they ate at a different lunch wave.

The faculty room was quite small, with room for a table, a sink and a refrigerator. As we sat there one day, someone opened the refrigerator and I noticed a very nice lunch bag that I hadn’t seen before. It had a name on it that wasn’t familiar to me, so I asked in general, “Who is Vera Bradley? What does she teach?”

The two ladies burst into laughter and informed me that Vera Bradley was the brand name of an upscale line of bags.

The science teacher sitting next to me, Terry Henkle, who is now at the high school, leaned over and said, “I’m glad you asked. I was going to ask the same thing.”

Robert F. Welt is a retired Groton Public Schools teacher who lives in Mystic.