“The oldest form of
theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night,
same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.” ~ Michael J. Fox
San Mateo, circa 1960s.
Dinner was the required event
at our house and in most American households.
In our home it was straight up six, every night right after mom and dad
had drained their martinis. About five,
dad would shake up some gin with a whisper of vermouth in a gray metal cocktail shaker and the parents would
savor a couple of cocktails until dinner time.
The gin was cheap stuff, probably Seagram’s. I doubt the existence of snooty boutique gin
in 1960 and mom and dad wouldn't have it if it did exist. It was after I’d moved back home after college
that dad included me in the ritual and I developed a taste for martinis. I still had the cocktail shaker and used it up until a few years ago when the doc took alcohol off my menu. I recently gave it to my son in law for his home bar. In sixties America you didn't entertain the
thought of skipping dinner for work or an “activity.” Yeah, dinner was the activity; not soccer or dance class or karate. And certainly not work. You worked your 8 hour day and then came home. Those leashes known as cell phones and
laptops were fantasies in the minds of a few dreamers. Dinnertime was sacred.
We took dinner at a plain square gray Formica table with
black tubular legs. I have a faint
recollection of getting a fair sized knot on my noggin when I was at the age of
being head high with the corners of that table, colliding with it during a
romp around the house. Mom used a table
cloth and cloth napkins until the day she determined that place mats and paper
napkins were much less work.
The menu was 1960’s American; meat, oftentimes fried;
potatoes swimming in grease, butter or sour cream – or all three; and vegetables,
boiled to an ugly pale green and then made palatable with an unhealthy dollop
of butter and plenty of salt. It was all
washed down with Alamaden Mountain Red Burgundy that mom bought in the
convenient giant economy sized jug over at Frank's Liquors in the nearby shopping center. Mom liked to patronize Frank's because it was run by a paisano, Frank Lintini. On the times that I tagged along with her, she would buy me a little chocolate square called an Ice Cube. In mom’s Italian tradition I was given wine at dinner with a splash of water.
Food wasn't wolfed in order to escape to another
room. When the main meal was done mom
would put out an assortment of cheeses (again in the Italian tradition) and then
long after the cheese was put up we lingered at the table in the gray haze of
my parents’ cigarette smoke. The dinner table is a nostalgic American antique that we've been admonished to restore. We talked; related stories of the day. When I got older we argued, about everything from politics to music to the length of my hair. But whether it was quiet conversation or a knockdown drag out it was interaction. Yeah we're supposed to go back to that but hell, that horse is up the road and long gone. Someone's going to be away; at work or at practice or away at the table itself absorbed with what's on You Tube.
We ate to the accompaniment of the nightly news on TV in
the adjoining family room; The Huntley – Brinkley Report, Chet Huntley in New
York and David Brinkley in Washington DC.
Serious looking almost dour, they were no nonsense newsmen who stared us down, didn't smile and they didn't banter. News anchors weren't black and they weren't
female. America wasn't ready for black
TV anchors; it wasn't even ready for black college students in some parts of
the country. In 1960 who could have guessed that a perky Asian woman would one day be all the rage in TV news. The dour newsmen gave America the cold hard facts, free
of fluff, laughter and happy talk. Hell
it was the Cold War and who can find anything fluffy in nuclear destruction. The show always ended,
"Goodnight Chet."
"Goodnight David."
And Goodnight, for NBC News."
Nonna (my maternal Italian grandmother) was usually absent
from the dinner table. She took her
dinner early and would sit alone at the end of the couch in the living room,
clicking rosary beads in her hand or thumbing through an Italian magazine that
the relations in the old country had sent.
At around 7 she would toddle off to bed to get up at 3:30 the next
morning and take up her spot on the couch.
Looking back I wonder if she chose to miss the family meals or if mom
had banished her. They’d had plenty of arguments and by now Nonna was starting
to become a “burden.” Mom didn't know
what the hell to do with her when we wanted to take a family vacation (unless
it was a flight back to Rome in which case Nonna of course traveled with
us). Nonna was no trouble at all when I
was younger and in grade school, and someone had to be home when I wasn't in
school. I remember a few occasions many
years later when I brought home a Korean girl named Nana, who I was
dating. My parents looked at Nana with
raised eyebrows but not Nonna. Nana
would leave the table early to sit by my grandmother, take her hand and
chat. The two, Nonna and Nana would have
a conversation of sorts. One in broken
spaghetti English, the other with a thick Korean accent. Funny thing is sometimes the accents sounded the same. Nana was the only person I ever brought home who so
engaged Nonna.
As Nonna got older and needed more care, mom would often
promise me that she would never be such a burden. Turned out she was right. Some 20 years later I would get a late night
call from my dad that an ambulance was at the house. Early the next morning, mom passed away from
the heart attack she’d suffered. Turned
out her real burden were the cigarettes, martinis, and meat and potatoes.
Mom usually cooked just enough for the night’s meal. There was no thought of waste. Eat your meat
right down to the damn bone and if the bone is sturdy enough give it to the dog
to gnaw on. Any leftovers were saved for
another meal; lunch or a dinner of some sort of stew or combination of a few
nights leavings. If bread got old Nonna
would tear it into pieces and toss it on the front lawn for the birds. The thought of food going into the garbage
was an abomination; a sin, not against God but against the food itself. Mom and Nonna had lived in wartime Italy, a
time and place in which food could be precious.
Dad grew up during the Great Depression.
Middle class, middle aged America had a healthy respect for food even if
the food itself wasn't healthy.
The America at the dinner table that you described so well has gone the way of the Edsel and has been gone for some time. It would be easy to blame it on the addiction to cell phones and other gadgets that has so many Americans in its grip. Those devices are what sealed the coffin of the time-honored standard of the family gathering for dinner. The death of the customary dinner began before that, when people started cramming more activities into their schedules until those activities took over and became what an average day was about.
ReplyDeleteIt is weird and just plain ugly to see people gathered together but because they're obsessed with their blasted phones and tablets, they are each set apart from the others. The scene is not confined to homes. Go into any restaurant and observe the activity at the other tables. Almost every table has a group of people who are each in their own world, enthralled by cell phones and any other gadget they are armed with.
I wonder if the infamous pope chain made it into any of those conversations between Nonna and Nana.
Now that it's just the wife and I we often eat separately. And I have to admit that I've got half an eye on my laptop when we're eating. When the rest of the family is here there is no electronic interference. When the kids were in high school activities did start to worm their way into the dinner hour but for the most part, even with all of the activities we managed to have family dinners more often than not.
Delete