ever known a neighbourhood to be an actual neighbourhood and neighbours to be true neighbours? The last I knew,Ward and June Cleaver were fictional characters, and television cameras rolled when they gathered around the dinner table to serve up apple pie and Christian insight to Wally, the Beaver, and the Great Unwashed.
At our dinner table, Maddy and I always reach our limits at the forty-five-minute mark.This isn’t an approximate thing; we time it, and it arrives every evening like clockwork — except on pizza night.All food and beverages are consumed, and all cleanup complete, within half an hour on pizza night.
But that evening in particular, steaks, congealing and still barely touched, lay on Eric’s and Rachel’s plates as minute thirty-eight popped up on the microwave clock. As usual, we sat in the kitchen — not out of any Rockwellian tradition, or in the hope of exchanging casual information about our busy days, but out of necessity. If we threw a TV and comfortable seating into the mix, the kids would never finish supper.
“Meat is murder, y’know,” Rachel said, breaking a lengthy silence. She grimaced as she poked at the drying brown slab in front of her.
“Was that The Smiths or The Cure?” I asked, looking to Maddy.
“The Smiths, I think,” she said. “You sure it wasn’t Al Jolson?” Eric asked. The mood was still light enough and wouldn’t get truly ugly for a few minutes; we had one or two more steps to follow in the intricate Kearns/Moffatt dinner ritual.
I stood, scooped up Maddy’s and my empty plates from the table, and carried them to the sink.“That’s not informed enough to be an insult, buddy boy.You’re two generations off.”
“You never answered my question, Dad,” Rachel said.
“You never asked one.”
“No, but she did voice a concern,” Eric said, and I could sense a looming snootiness in his tone, as if he thought he were about to score points. “Our generation does have some. And here’s another: mad cow disease.” He now eyed his steak as if it were reprehensible and pushed it away.
With the dishes safely in the sink, I turned and leaned against the counter’s edge. “Whoa,” I said. “I’m not even going to touch that one.”
Eric looked at me, all innocence. “Why not?”
“Just because, that’s why.”
“But he’s got a point, Dad,” Rachel said, poking at her wilting salad. “Mad cow disease is a serious health issue.”
“No. It was a serious health issue at the beginning of dinner,” I said. “Now it’s just another attempt at one of your last-minute suppertime bailouts.”
“And if you must know,” Maddy added,“your father picked up the steaks at the Big Carrot.They’re organic.”
Instantly, both children spewed laughter. Finally, Rachel managed to say, “You mean Dad actually went shopping at a health food st—”
“Oh, you find that funny, do you?” I said.
“Totally,” she said.“I’m just trying to imagine you clumping around the Big Carrot’s aisles in your work boots, squeezing the tofu and—”
“Well, here’s what I find funny,” I said, cutting her off again (now fully stung by her stereotyping).“Both of you would eat a hamburger ... no, scratch that, both of you would gobble a banquet burger and a side order of chili fries without a single mention of health issues or animal rights, but when we stick a proper meal in front of you, both of you bleat and bellow like ... like mad cows yourselves.Your arguments aren’t consistent.” I blew out a breath, winded by my own bullshit, tossed my hands in the air, then added,“And y’know what else? I should have picked up some tofu. Watching you guys try to eat it would have given your mother and me a few dinner table laughs.”
Not even the clink of cutlery cut the ensuing silence, and Maddy seized the opening.
“Well, once you get past his delivery,” she said, glancing at me, “your father’s right.You need variety — which means you can’t just stick to fast foods.And let me tell you. Both of you will be sorry five years from now if you cheat yourself of your full physical potential. So much of how you feel about yourselves is going to hang on that.”
And so, pretty well on schedule, our version of dinner theatre slipped into its third act: she’d uttered the full-physical-potential monologue. Both children bent over their plates and started sawing off morsels (a knee-jerk reaction that would last for one mouthful) while I still hovered around the sink, contemplating the great circle of life. Roll back the clock thirty-odd years and I’d be the one pinned to the table.
The one difference would be that my mother and father mostly worked the guilt angle. In my day, when I contemplated the shrivelled pork chop or cluster of ice-cold greenery that had been congealing on my plate for close to an hour, my parents would fall into cross-talk routines, ranging from the patented “We bend over backwards for you and what do we get in return?” speech to the impassioned “How do you think a child in Biafra would respond to what’s on your plate?” lecture.Apparently, children there would wrestle each other to the dry, cracked turf for a single Brussels sprout, snapping twig-like appendages in the process.
I looked at the microwave as 6:47 transmuted into 6:48. We’d started at 6:05. Time marched; finger-wagging and then sanctions (lifted almost as soon as they’d been imposed) loomed. So, with images of my childhood dinner table ordeals still fresh in my mind (along with the pang of being labelled socially one-dimensional), I spoke.
“Y’know,” I said,“there are kids in Biafra who’d literally kill to get what’s on your plate.”
“Bi-whooo?” Eric said.
“Bi-whaa?” Rachel said, almost simultaneously.
“We’ve got three hundred television channels, you can make reference to Al Jolson in your conversation, but you’ve never heard of Biafra?”
“Uh, Jim,” Maddy said. “Maybe that’s because there’s no such place as Biafra.”
“What do you mean? Biafra! Y’know, the country where hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, starved to death back when we were Eric and Rachel’s age.”
“As far as I can recall,” Maddy said, “Biafra was a part of Nigeria that reverted back when their civil war ended — in the late sixties ... no, 1970, I think.”
“Exactly,” I said.“Yes. Nigeria ... that’s where...”
“Aha,” Eric said, pointing his fork at me in an annoyingly adult way (I had no idea where he picked up the mannerism). “You didn’t know that interesting little fact, did you?”
Of course I didn’t, but before I could utter any logical response, I said,“ I know plenty, pal ... like, what do you call five hundred Biafrans in the back seat of a Volkswagen?”
“Jim!” Maddy said.
“So? What do you call them, Dad?” Rachel, as tone deaf as children sometimes are, looked at me expectantly.
I glanced over at Maddy, torn between my two gals, if that’s not being too melodramatic, before going for the laugh: “Corduroy upholstery.”
The kids looked at me with vacant expressions.
“I guess you had to have been there,” I said.
“Okay, you two can go now.” Maddy nodded at the children and I peeked at the microwave; we’d sat at the table for forty-five minutes exactly.
As they left the kitchen, she called out: “But you both have to eat a bowl of cereal and some grapes before bed tonight.” They slipped away without response, leaving us alone, yet somehow I suspected fingers would still wag — right on schedule.
“I wish you’d quit doing that,” she said, as soon as the footsteps had faded.
“Quit