The dinner table was more than a place to eat at our house; it was an institution. A place where the family gathered and broke bread, as well we irritated one another with our compulsive table habits. Father with his incessant humming, my sister Vicky always shunning the gravy; choosing, instead to wash her dry dinner down with water and myself with my flailing elbows, knocking into the guy next to me, usually my older brother and sometimes on purpose. My mother was too busy dishing out the roast to be irritating anyone and baby sister Alex didn’t come along until I was 14 and by that time, we were all rigidly disciplined, boring as heck and dinner became only a place to eat, and then run away from, before someone recruited you for dish duty.

What I really loved about Roast beef Sunday, other than stuffing my Yorkies with as much of my plate food as possible and smothering it with gravy and horseradish, was that, the left over beef ends were then minced through Mom’s old tabletop cranker and made into Cottage pie filling for Tuesdays dinner, which was my absolute favorite, but, that’s a story for another day.

Typically, it was a quiet affair during the first part of supper, as we attacked our meals, then Dad would begin humming a song that nobody recognized, Vicky would ask someone to pass the salt, in which nobody did, and I would be fully engaged in building stuffed Yorkies on my plate, scattering bits of beef all over my place-setting while brother Shaun would be knocking my elbows back toward me. I remember there was always salad and Mom would concoct a dressing using vinegar and sugar; the sugar, I suppose, was to make eating plain lettuce more palatable; bringing truth to the old English adage: if it doesn’t taste good, or, if its a vegetable, put sugar on it. At this point, I was too enthralled in the carnage that was developing on and around my plate, to pay much attention to salad. If Alex were at the table at this point in time; more likely than not, she would be scanning the table wondering how in the world she was ever born into this suburban phenomena.

Conversation would generally be erratic with no real flow, mainly lots of odd sounds punctuated by a moderate Bristolian flair. There would be long pauses and then something would pop out of someone’s mouth in the form of a few irrelevant words, often accompanied by a food projectile, startling the rest of us out of our feeding trance. A glass would tip over, a fork would drop to the floor and then momentary pandemonium would ensue, followed quickly by father’s dissatisfied rolling of the eyes. Quickly we’d all pull ourselves back together and continue along our merry way until dessert, which usually included either Jello or vanilla ice cream with syrup and sometimes Trifle, which was basically Jello mixed with cake and then topped with custard. Dad would have his warm apple pie with cheese ( I’ve sampled this interesting combination; it’s actually not bad), and this is when I would start planning my exit strategy.

Mom and Dad had instilled in us the ancient, and very proper tradition of asking to be excused from the table. Today, most would liken this ritual to asking if it was okay to get off the Potty! Dining today has become just that; a bodily function. It is to fulfill an urge and then be done with it, like going to the toilet. In my household, as with many back in the day, suppertime was an event; the central core of the family day when siblings and parents would come together to celebrate their daily achievements and pay homage to the issues that were important to each member of the family. Now, it appears, dinner is eaten out of a box, sitting around the TV watching Netflix. I am not absolved of this institutional digression; let’s face it, it’s easier to face primetime fodder then it is to face the scrutiny of those you love, while chowing down on something you didn’t have to cook or clean up afterwards. But I am going off topic here.

My escape plan was simple: I learned to string “Please may I be excused from the table” into an inaudible single syllable word, so it became: “pleasescusededable?” in which case my parents would stare back at me, not having a clue how to respond. I got up, left my plate on the table, indicating I was still engaged, then I would scoot down to my room as fast as I could, before anybody even knew what happened. Dish duty would default to the next person in line and my only penance was to endure my siblings scathing resonance for the remainder of the night. Which was easy.

Life with my siblings was not a complicated affair. My brother and sister were good, I wasn’t so much, so it became my daily objective to fulfill my assignment of being the black sheep of the family. I would do menacing little things like kidnap my sisters dolls and paint moustaches and beards on them, and then I would defend my innocence, knowing it was futile, but doing so anyways, because I needed the practice for my sordid juvenile career. Actually I wasn’t that bad; I often got roped into doing stupid things by other people like: one summer, a friend and I were bored, so we broke into the local elementary school and stole chalk! We exited by the lower basement window, and to our surprise, were greeted by two burley police officers who thought it would be a good idea to teach us a lesson. They handcuffed us and put us in the back seat of the police car, which is where we spent the rest of our sunny afternoon, being questioned and intimidated until we were scared out of our pants. Our parents were called and there were people standing around watching; it was humiliating. We never did that again.

Another time, with another friend. ( perhaps I should have picked better friends), in my later teenaged years, my friend and I thought it would be a good idea that I stand on his shoulders and dismantle a street sign at 3 am. Having no idea this little misdemeanor would be considered as “theft of public property under $500.00” it ended up reaping us a day in court and each a $150.00 fine. That was a big price to pay for two jobless teenagers, who only wanted a souvenir to mount on my buddies wall.

These are a couple of stand outs, but a pretty good indication that my crimes were minor and I did have a moral threshold, which was taught well to me, by my parents, while sitting around the dinner table. I knew it was bad karma to bust into jewelry stores and to snatch old ladies handbags, I had a very firm hold on what was right and what was wrong and my little crimes were not a gateway to a life of crime; I just liked to push the envelope a little from time to time, and push the envelope, I did. I have stories I could tell you, but, it would take pages and pages, and my goal here is not to write my memoirs; I will have plenty of time for that later; I wanted to write short essays about people who are close to me and how they have affected my life over the years.

My mother and father were, and still are, pretty much, the most functional set of parents you could ask for. They came from a very traditional background and left a world of family and friends behind when they decided to set sail across the north Atlantic and settle in Ontario. It was a selfless act and they did it because they wanted a better life for their children, which, at that time, was just my older brother and myself. They raised us right and, even though, they did have to deal with a somewhat, rebellious child, it wasn’t their fault that I was so. In my opinion, this is how middle children deal with over achieving siblings; we can’t be better than them so, let’s see how much attention we can get by being worse. When my sister Alex came along, she was a sibling after my own heart. I knew she had the edge; that slightly, inauspicious lean to the insurgent side, but, by the time she was old enough to begin training, I had already flown the coop. I had to leave her to wing it alone and she filled the role elegantly. Not as clear-cut and worrisome as I was, I don’t think, but, not to sound sexist, she was a girl and girls get away with, pretty much, everything and, besides, she didn’t have to endure her teens in the shadow of two very stable siblings.

As the family has disbanded over the years, supper time, I am sure, became less dramatic, until eventually all, but, one of us had departed for another part of the earth. The days, and years, that it became only Alexandra and my parents, are a blank spot for me. I have no idea what supper time was like. For all I know, they could have spent the next decade, or so, eating Colonel Saunders out of a bucket in front of David Lettermen! I doubt it, because to this very day, my mother and father still adhere to the strict timeslot of 6 pm, as they sit down and enjoy their meal together, after almost 70 years of being married. That is an incredible accomplishment and probably one of the factors, as small as it is, as to why they have been together so long.

Mom still makes her Roast beef and Dad still enjoys his apple pie with cheese and the last I heard, Mom was buying her Yorkshire pudding frozen from the store! More importantly, one day, I see a time, when we will all sit at the supper table again together. My elbows will flail, Dad will hum, brother Shaun will push my elbows back toward me and sister Alex will scan the table, not wondering so much why she was born into this family, but thankful, as we all are, that we were.

bon Apetit!

Moms Yorkshire Pudding recipe ( I think)

175 gr of plain flour

2 large eggs

175 ml milk

110 ml water

4 tablespoons water