Mealtime Madness

While I was growing up, dinner time at my house could be both an exercise in survival and a matching of wits. My boisterous Irish Catholic family consisted of six boys and four girls, three of whom were adopted. My parents loved to tell people that we natural siblings were homegrown. I always questioned the soundness of that analogy considering it was the 70’s and this term usually carried completely different connotations. Added to the mix of my “homegrown” and adopted siblings were my paternal grandfather and an array of dogs and cats.

Dinner was a very important time of day for my dad. Every night we would gather at the table for an experience I can only describe as utter chaos. He felt strongly about the value of quality time, long before anyone had coined the phrase. So every night we gathered, with my dad presiding at the head of the table. Stories were told, fights were fought, punishments rendered, and sibling rivalries fortified all within the confines of a couple of boxes of macaroni and cheese.

Our table wasn’t fancy. There wasn’t time for it to be. Everything got dumped in the middle of the table. Silverware, glasses, condiments, you name it. The plates would get set at my mom’s place so she could serve all the food from her seat and pass it down the line. I’m sure it was the only way she could keep any order over the situation. That and make sure the younger ones at least got something to eat in the process.

No remembrance of my family’s dinner time would be complete without touching upon my mom’s culinary aptitude. I’m not saying that she couldn’t cook. It’s just that her imagination left something to be desired. In her defense, though, I do have to say that she was faced with the endless chore of providing balanced nutrition to thirteen people day in and day out, three hundred and sixty five days a year. A task I find daunting today with a meager family of three. If only someone had told her about spices.

Fortunately, most days we were safe. Beans and franks, macaroni and cheese, and of course fish on Fridays during Lent. On Sundays though, she went all out with a big roast, mashed potatoes, and gravy. It was when she tried to experiment that you had to worry. There was one concoction she served that if you were to mention it to my siblings even today, it would make the hairs on their arms stand on end. Ground beef and canned bean sprouts. That’s it, nothing else. No salt. No pepper. No taste. It was quite a frightening sight to behold on your plate. Hamburger with worms. It was amazing how fast I could come down with some sort of ailment on those nights so I could skip dinner. Yuck!

I’m making it sound worse than it was. She made very good lasagna. Though, we only had that on the nights my dad was out (which wasn’t often), because he didn’t like it. Nevertheless, as with all of her cooking, it was plain. I used to think she’d make a good Amish person. Sadly, I found out they were actually very good cooks. They only dressed plain.

Mashed potatoes were a staple food at Sunday dinners in my house. I hated getting stuck with peeling duty because it would take forever. You’d have to peel at least ten pounds given that one of my brothers could eat a five pound bag all by himself. While my mother’s mashed potatoes were reasonably palatable (it depended on whether you liked lumps or not), they also had another very interesting quality. They made great caulking material. My brothers liked to use them to fill in the little cracks underneath the dining room table. Years later when my parents finally sold the big table they didn’t need anymore, they couldn’t figure out what all the hardened gunk was covering the underside of the table.

My siblings and I like to say that we had to learn how to eat as fast so we wouldn’t miss out on any food. I’ve always suspected though, that we unconsciously had ulterior motives. In our house the last two suckers caught at the table would inevitability be stuck doing the dishes. More often than not, I was the lone sucker remaining at the table. The reason: that evil glass of milk. I would always pray someone else would get in trouble, thereby drawing my mom’s attention away from me and my nemesis. I absolutely hate milk. I always have and I always will. My mom, ever the disciplinarian, insisted I finish every drop that was in my glass. Never mind the fact that she couldn’t stand milk either and never touched the stuff. So there I sat, just me with my warm, disgusting glass of milk. By this time whoever was supposed to have shared dish duty with me had conned my mom into letting them off. As a result, not only was I nauseous from just having drunk a whole glass of warm milk, but I also had to clean up the kitchen and do the dishes alone.

As upset as I was about having to do the dishes by myself, it was probably safer as a solo operation. You never wanted to get around my brothers and a wet dish towel. There’s a certain degree of wetness a dish towel has to attain in order to reach its maximum effectiveness when snapping it at another person. Believe me; my brothers practiced on me enough to know the precise number of pots and pans they needed to dry in order to attain the perfect welt. That’s not to say that I couldn’t stand my ground in an out and out war. But there was no way I could hold a candle to them when it came to speed and accuracy. If towel snapping were an Olympic sport, they would have had no problem qualifying for the U.S. Team. My mom always complained about how many dish towels we went through. Little did she know she was actually providing her children with a unique, if not dangerous, method of developing their hand to eye coordination.

We had a beautiful Irish Setter named Katie Shannon. Katie loved dinner time. I’m talking about our dinner time, not hers. Being under that table while everyone was eating was like hitting the doggie jackpot. Who needed dog chow when you could have all the hamburger and bean sprouts you could ever ask for? The vet could never understand why Katie never seemed to be able to lose any weight, when my mom insisted she was only being fed once a day. It must have been hard enough for my parents to make sure the kids were eating, but to make sure the dogs weren’t? There was a joke about Irish Setters that my parents loved to tell. “How do Irish Setters get the bumps on their heads?” “From running into parked cars.” Sorry mom and dad, but I beg to differ. I think ‘ol Katie got her bump from constantly hitting her head underneath the table. Poor dog was forever getting scolded for being under there. But then, Irish Setters aren’t known for their intelligence.

Over the years I’ve thought back many times with fondness and humor at what transpired on a nightly basis in my house. I find it more than a little ironic that I married a man who was an only child and that we were to have only one child ourselves. My son loves to hear the stories I tell about these seemingly chaotic, yet ever normal daily rituals from my youth. He would love though, to have a mother who liked to cook. But that’s a whole different story.