Family Dinner: A Moral Fable in 3 Acts
I blame my divorce and the break-up of our family on the fact that we never had family dinner over the roughly 20 years we were all together. OK, I know, that is a bit heavy for typical social media lightness. And it does sound a bit over the top. But hear me out.
My dad, Norton Melaver, ran a family grocery business. He worked his ass off and was successful at it. But of all his successes, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, compared to his daily practice of coming home around 7:15 every evening, sitting down with all of us for the evening meal, and shutting out the rest of the world for at least that one hour. Almost without fail, during our special hour each day together the phone would ring. One of us, not dad, would answer it, although it was always for him. “I’m sorry, he’s eating dinner right now, can I take a message and have him call you back?” It was more than a script, it was an establishment of priorities. For at least a short span of time every day, the rest of the world faded into the background, and the focus was on the five of us. That was it. If this sounds like a bit of revisionist, poly-annish history, you are welcome to your own view. I know that family dinner was the core of who we were as a unit.
Fast forward to this past weekend. My daughter is here for a short visit, the first time I have seen her in 8 months. We cook dinner together. She does a very cool avocado curry and rice dish. I do a bit of peanut butter hummus with sourdough bread and creamed spinach. We have Mango-Habanero sorbet for dessert. Everything is vegan. My son joins us just as everything is about ready. My son pours himself a scotch. My daughter and I stick with Campari and Soda. We spend the next several hours around the dinner table, talking about nothing in particular and about everything: I don’t remember much in the way of details. A long disquisition on Douglas Adams and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency comes to mind. But since we are on the subject of Douglas Adams, apropos of another of his books, the secret to life is not 42. It’s family dinner.
