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.
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