nuggets on nights when dinner’s escaping
by bam
if not for the culinary peculiarities of the little one, who demands them shamefully often, they would live on a shelf with all the emergency supplies–the flashlight, the batteries, the coil of rope.
and the nuggets. dehydrated, faux breaded chicken parts, cut in coy little legs to make you think you’re eating the very real thing. they too would be off with the back-ups. banned from public consumption. except in the case of a hurricane.
reserved for nights like last night. sad, pathetic, make-your-heart-pound nights like last night.
nights when dinner pulls every trick in the book in its wily attempt to escape.
ah, but it knows not who it’s up against.
i am fierce, i am nuts, when it comes to defending the dinner hour. i am, admittedly, a kook about gathering all of us, sitting us ’round the same maple slab, holding hands even, saying grace, digging in.
in to the occasional whining and actual snippets of real conversation. into the boy who’s been known to sink under the table. or the long stringy pastas that slide faster than he does in a race to the floor. it must be a game, see who gets there first.
oh, some nights it’s not pretty. but it is dinner, and it’s the knot in the cloth of our life where all the very loose threads come together. we twist. and we talk. and we tell all our stories.
given the age span, given as we dig into peas we are hearing who called whom “stupid” in kickball, and as we move on to noodles, what horror is being targeted by the global activist club, it can make your head whirl, boing like a little white ball, from one side of the plate to the other.
sometimes even the grownups get a chance to jump in. we might hear how the donald hung up on the daddy. or how mommy forgot, once again, to cancel the milkman because the global activist does not like the dairy man’s politics.
no matter the madness, there is a method. a crux of the matter. it dates back over a decade.
long ago, for my day job, i spent a very long time talking and listening to a truly fine family. i spent months, actually. i was there to record the emptying of their once very full nest; four children, busy lives, and then suddenly, two grownups alone in a very big house.
in the midst of reporting that story, the father once told me the single most fundamental thread of their incredibly tugged-apart life, a life that remained as entwined as any french knot, was their religious commitment to dinner, family dinner. if it was 9 o’clock before all stumbled in from wherever they’d been, they still made it happen.
the non-negotiables were these: a meal, a table, a carved-out hour at the end of the day. full attendance.
i had only one very young boy at the time. already, most every night we pushed that high chair up to the table, ate all together. it made as much sense to me as turning a spigot to fill a glass full of water.
but sometimes, even when you already know, the teacher speaks and the lesson is sealed. mr. grabowski, that was his name, is my muse for the coming together at the end of the day.
he didn’t let baseball or debate or that godawful soccer that seems to think it owns the hour from 6 until 7 get in the way of whatever was slopped on the plate, and spooned down besides.
and neither will i.
darn thing is, it’s not getting easier. the forces, it seems, are gathering. doing all they can to pull me and the dinner apart, into so many nuggets sucked down so many throats.
i’ll be damned.
last night it was the school newspaper. layout stretches right through the dinner hour, or so we’d been told. the budding young journalists move headlines, crop pictures, chomp pizza.
i had made a swift but lovely dinner for the rest of us. had stopped my workday with time to chop madly, saute, and let simmer. i even steamed up the broccoli, a famously ridiculed stand-by in this house. we managed to walk to the train to meet the commuter, sauntered home for a short respite before i dashed off to a book circle.
that’s when the phone rang. it was the manchild who’d been editing stories. he was ready for pickup, he informed. i looked at the stove, the pots and pans bright with so many colors. i looked at my husband, grabbing his keys.
that’s when my jaw dropped. that’s when i thought, no way, not now. can’t he wait? i mean i’ve gone to this trouble. can’t we sit down? can’t we at least shovel the food, pretend that we’re dining?
but i said not a word. he was gone before i could manage to banish some nagging counter-thought that of course we needed to pick up the child who’d gone off to school with three measly hours of sleep, a biology test and a 20-page paper to boot.
but then the phone rang again. it was the boy journalist. seems his eagerness to get home, to climb into bed perhaps, was a bit premature. he’d just been advised by the teacher in charge that it would be at least one more hour.
oops.
well, this is a world where we are all cellularly connected. except when we’re not. except when i dial the cell of my mate, and i hear it singing its song in the drawer in the desk in the kitchen.
oops. and oh no.
i had two choices: let the man wait by the curb at the school, wondering, not knowing, not having the means to call for a clue.
or i could haul the little one, hop in the other car, and drive like a madwoman to cut him off at the pass.
that’s where the nuggets came in.
the bright colored foods in the pot were not portable dinner. surely would slosh from the plate to the lap to the seat there in the back of a car being steered by a madwoman, a crazed woman, a woman who just wanted one thing from the day: a nice quiet meal before all of us spun our own ways.
alas, i zapped a few lumps of phony poulet, tossed the plate to the boy, and took off after the wagon.
so there’s me, the one who believes with every cell in her body, that dinner together is a very good thing. and i’m driving past one high school on the way to the other. i am passing very long lines there at the school, all these supersized vans filled with supersized carryouts, i wonder. given that it’s their dinner hour as well. and i am amazed at how many folks are not at their homes, at their tables, but there at the curb of the school, waiting.
but as i am thinking, i’m zooming. i too am clicking the clicker, turning the wheel at the hour that’s supposed to be sacred. the whole ride i am listening to a voice in my head, telling me, loudly, that i really have lost it. why not, it practically shouts, wave a white flag? why not let the dinner dissemble? why chase the man from the other side of the table back to the table? why the insistence on sitting, as many as we can possibly manage, together in that very fine circle?
because i am stubborn is why. because i will not let the world take away the one thing i deeply believe in, the sacred communion of slowing, of passing the bread, of pouring more milk. of asking, quite simply, so what was the best part of your day? what was the hard part?
i won’t give up listening. asking for seconds. or thirds, when it comes to the stories that simmered all day. that stewed. that are ripe, as we gather, for plucking.
we got home, yes we did. all three of us sat and we supped (the nuggets were starters for the backseat rider, who when we got home wanted more, i am sad to report).
the colors weren’t bright anymore. the sausage not terribly warm. but it was good. and it filled us, it did.
i might put in a call to mr. grabowski. ask him how in the world he so managed.
this here’s fightin’ words. anyone else fierce about guarding that hour? how do you do it? what grace do you find at the table? where and how did you learn that what unfolds as a family at dinner is, perhaps, the single most essential nutrient?
5 comments:
slj
just a quick note to say I have a podcast on my ipod just waiting to be heard… “the amazing power of the family dinner” from Jean Ferraca’s program “Here on Earth” on Wisconsin Public radio. I can’t wait to soak up the wisdom of the show.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 – 10:38 AM
Carol
My friend grew up in a family of six with the sacred family dinner hour. When raising her three daughters, her husband was a producer for Ted Koppel’s nightline, which meant that he never had dinner at home on weekdays. The thought of this really bothered my friend, so she invented two kinds of family dinners. On weekdays, they had the “All Girls’ Family Dinner”. On Weekends it was the “All Girls and One Guy Family Dinner.” The girls are all grown now, but they THINK they have always had the family meal together. My friend felt the loss, but she created a dining event that made the girls feel they all dined together.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 – 10:56 AM
hh
Family dinners are sacred at our home too. We gather, we hold hands, we pray, we eat, we share stories, sometimes we argue. We do it almost every night – the 5 of us (2 teens, 1 pre-teen, and 2 parents — do you see where the arguing might fit in?). But this past Monday night, the boy who plays football was in Lockport for a game and his dad went to the game, and the girl who plays tennis was at practice followed by a fall sports pizza party. That left me and the pre-teen at home. We had dinner – leftovers to be sure, but the table was set just so, we held hands just we two as we said grace with her right hand in my left hand and her left hand in my right. We made the circle complete just we two as we said our prayer. She thought that was funny. Shared it with the others the next night at dinner when the five of us were together and the circle was larger.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 – 01:33 PM
bam
hh, i love that story. a circle that contracts and expands. sounds like the human heart to me. i can picture it right in my mind.
we do the same. circles of 2, 3 or 4. i suppose the way i set my table, even for just little old me, i even do a circle of one. it was my unwillingness last night to succumb to the pressures that tear us away that caught my attention. if i’d gotten pulled over i was ready with my story: you see, officer, there’s this thing at our house called family dinner. and it’s being stolen away. and i’m chasing it. in hot pursuit of an ideal too good to relinquish…
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 – 03:05 PM
jcv
This is huge for me too, and my children are younger so we’re not yet set upon by the forces of unraveling. Yet my husband is often not home for dinner, and in my mind this sometimes translates into, “oh whatever, we can eat cereal tonight,” or perhaps, “they’ll be fine with frozen taquitos.” But in so thinking I am simply falling prey early to the unraveling forces. Dinner means a real meal, a real set table, and really together as much as possible. Just tonight, I threw something half-assed on the table, in stages, trying to sate every hungry whine as quick as possible. We didn’t get home until six (normal dinner time) because of martial arts–and the teacher had just given me and my son a long harangue about how we must commit to this at least twice a week. (“In the same way you always wear a helmet when you ride a bike….In the same way you always wear a seatbelt in the car….It is the law. It is the right thing to do. It is just the way you do things.”) Thank you Mr. Dinner Unraveler. I’ll be cracking out that crock pot for sure, in hopes of regaining Wednesdays for the good of the table.
We don’t have the scintillating-table-conversation thing going very well yet, and we are somehow perpetually relearning that we’re supposed to use forks and not our hands, as the eight-year-old wants to do, or putting face straight into the plate as four-year-old wants to do. As much effort as this is I can’t even imagine how regular car-dinner kids are ever supposed to learn how to morph from their own natural practically feral selves into civilized humans who know how to sit at a table and eat. I don’t get it.
So yes, I’m fierce. It does seem rather a matter of fierceness because otherwise it all gets away too easily. Stay strong, Dinner Commandants.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 – 09:18 PM