My Dad's Dinner Table

All great change begins at the dinner table

~ Ronald Reagan

Every day my mother lovingly and carefully prepared three healthful and substantial meals for my father, my younger brother and me. Reading a post from September 21, 2010 on “Our Dinner Table," Delight in Losing Arguments, bounced me way back in time—decades back, in fact—to my family’s dinner table and something that usually occurred at each evening meal. 

This nightly “event” was my father’s seemingly unquenchable need to bring up some subject he knew would elicit groans and comments from my brother and me. “Daaaaad, that can’t be true.” “Who said?” “Where’d you read it?”

My recollection is that these “conversations” began when I was 11 or 12 years old and became a regular ritual at the dinner table. With no preamble, Dad would make some pronouncement to my younger brother and me which sounded blatantly outrageous.

         

Out-of-the-blue comments such as “…there’s a new sewing machine that darns socks,” or “…when you’re washing windows, use old newspapers to dry and polish them,” and “always use cold water to wash milk out of a glass” or he might come out with, define and spell, some silly sounding word we had never heard of. When his declaration ended, he would look down and resume eating his dinner.

         

Of course everyone knows socks have to be mended with something inside of them (Mom used an old light bulb), so how could a machine do that? Naturally, when he said to use old newspapers to polish the windows, we both felt our father just wanted to save money and recycle (a term not even used in those days, but we understood “reuse”).  We certainly knew he was simply being a hot-water-electricity-saving-cheapskate when he instructed us to use cold water to wash out a milk glass.

         

In every instance, my brother and I felt as though he was daring us to prove him wrong. We could not help ourselves—we countered him with disbelieving comments and flew to the nearby Collier’s encyclopedias or the dictionary in an attempt to invalidate what our father had said.

Even though loud arguments often ensued, this uproar and dissension over the spelling of words, understanding of philosophies, and interpretation of concepts or feasibility of inventions, never deteriorated into personal insults. 

Mom stayed on the sidelines as the contentiousness went on and we settled the question or, simply tired of arguing.  Only then did we continue our dinner.

Eventually we discovered almost every pronouncement Dad made was factual.

For instance, over the next few years, Warren and I learned cold water breaks down the protein in milk; there actually was a new sewing machine that darned socks; some property in newsprint polishes windows without smearing. Moreover, of course, there were hundreds upon hundreds of dictionary words we had yet to discover. 

I’m not certain I fully understand why Dad preferred to make his declarations in a voice and manner that encouraged disagreement.

Over the last three decades, I have stumbled onto some plausible explanations—most having to do with my father’s childhood and the somber, silent, tension-filled home life of his family. He plainly never learned how to have a regular, gentle, back and forth conversation. Argument seemed his only avenue of connection.

Through all the years of her life, even after my brother and I moved away from home and returned for visits, Mom continued her crusade against those heated discussions—those oddly quarrelsome, yet never hateful, exchanges.  She always wanted serene and mellow times and they never arrived when my father was in residence.

Our dad died at 84 years of age. Just two weeks before his death, frail from the effects of prostate cancer, Dad reached his big, bony hand to my face and in a raspy whisper said, “I love you, do you know that? I guess I haven’t said it often enough…” Tears came to my eyes as I told him I loved him too, and I hadn’t told him often enough, either.  

It is entirely possible Dad’s benign polemics and the frenetic dinner table Ping Pong were the only ways he knew to make some connection with his children.

It’s also entirely possible it taught me to question the assumptions, statements, declarations and even ideologies of others—to take nothing for granted.  

Admittedly, it took quite a few years for me to realize that many people did not see this questioning or averring aspect of my personality to be, in essence, very benign—simply a learning process for me. I was attempting to understand and I certainly did not intend to malign the person himself.

I eventually tapped into the example set by Mom’s tireless (although somewhat naïve) crusade for harmony in our home. Due to her ability to gently defuse tense situations, I learned it is possible to disagree with others yet not be disagreeable.