Suppertime at our house was the absolute best part of the day. There was joyous laughter, life’s lessons were talked about openly and the day’s events were discussed among our happy family. Wait a minute… That was from an episode of Leave it to Beaver; dinner at our house was like a prison experiment. You sat and ate what was dished out and you weren’t allowed to speak. If you didn’t eat everything on your plate, you sat there until it petrified, and then you were forced to eat it later.
Our dining room table was oval-shaped with a removable center leaf. My father, as you might’ve guessed, sat at its head, and I sat to his immediate right, which unfortunately for me was within striking distance. Jan was placed at his left, and then came my mom; Karen was at the other head, while David sat next to me.
I have already established that my dad worked in retail. His days off were Friday and Sunday; on Saturday he worked his longest day. We usually ate dinner around five-thirty, mere moments after he returned home from work. He would walk through the door, kiss my mother with a loud resounding smack, take out his pocket protector full of pens, glasses and paperwork and sit down at the table. We would then make our way to the table, find our seats and sit down in silence. Sometimes our meals involved his participation. For example, if my mom were serving her awesome chili, he would butter and stack up the saltine crackers and distribute them like poker chips. Nobody else at the table was allowed to butter the crackers; I don’t know why, but I never asked. Even if he had a cold and was pulling out his hanky every ten minutes to blow his nose, he still buttered the crackers.
Karen was always the last one to leave the table because in fifteen years she had never finished a meal. Scratch that. Once, for a babysitter, she ate an entire family-sized box of macaroni and cheese with a spoon, right out of the pot. She loved that and green beans. Everything else on her plate somehow ended up in my stomach. I couldn’t bear to see her still sitting at the dining room table when it was dark outside.
As I was clearing the table, she would look at me with extremely sad, puppy dog eyes and ask me to eat the leftover food on her plate. She made a game of it and would often get on the floor with her hands clasped together and beg me. Every time I would come back to remove more dishes from the table, I would also pick up something off of her plate. She would even make neat, little piles so it was easier for me to scoop up. We had a good system. Additionally, there were times when I would purposely put less on my plate because I knew that in thirty minutes I would be eating from hers.
David never played along when it came to food threats. When my father commanded him to eat his dinner or go to bed, David would respond with “Goodnight.” He would often be in bed by 5:45. I couldn’t believe it. He chose to miss out on the tumbling; after dinner all the sofa cushions would be on the floor for the post meal Olympic try-outs.
One hilarious night non-talkative David decided to break the kids-keep-quiet commandment and talk during dinner. He decided to tell us the new word he had learned that day from Jimmy, the youngest Flanagan. Out of nowhere he chimes in with, “When Karen gets mad… she’s pissed.” I froze in mid-bite, in a total state of shock, as the breeze from my father’s right arm made the top of my hair move. In a millisecond David hit the back wall and was on the floor. Needless to say, he never went there again.
If ever there was something serious to talk about, it happened at the table. Report cards were the scariest of topics because of my keen ability to constantly underachieve. PTA meetings usually consisted of teachers telling my parents that I would rather entertain the class than learn. Well, that was a no-brainer. If I could get out of doing math by making the class laugh, I was all in. The dinner table was also where we learned about Jan’s cheerleading woes.
Jan wanted to be a cheerleader at Parkville Senior High in the worst way. She spent the majority of her time jumping around the living room, trying to do a split, spelling out words and placing her closed fists on her hips. I think they use magnets to keep them there. I spent the majority of my time catching all the lamps that she had knocked over. She was very loud and could make the whole house shake to the sounds of D-E-F-E-N-S-E. Karen used to shadow her and also learned every cheer and was equally as loud; however, her spelling was better.
Every year like clockwork the names of the new cheerleaders would be posted, and Jan’s name would be on page naught. She held in her emotions all day at school, but as soon as she hit the dinner table, she would burst into Niagara Falls tears. Jan was a professional zub-zubber too. Her whole body would shake, she’d go through a box of Kleenex, and the crying would last for days.
Once she cried through seven straight episodes of M*A*S*H, which I consider the funniest TV show ever. Okay, it’s a toss-up between that and The Dick Van Dyke Show, but seriously, how could anyone cry through M*A*S*H? In her senior year she didn’t make the squad either, but she was asked to be the mascot and spent the whole year wearing knight’s armor around the house. She was ecstatic, and by default, so were we. Gimme’ an A-B-O-U-T-T-I-M-E!
