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.
