Since we have started doing family dinners, has this create memories of family dinners growing up at 516 West Cameron? Think of a particular dinner, or kinds of dinners you ate while growing up and share some memories from these family dinners.Christy wrote about the relaxed Sunday dinners at 516, here, and I suppose Carol's post might have been titled, "When the Cat (Dad) is Away, the Mice (the Rest of Our Family) Will Play", here.
In the last many, many months that Mom was living in her house, until she went to the nursing home in May of 2017, it became more and more difficult and then, really, impossible for her to fix her own meals, especially dinner. Carol and Christy set up schedules to help each other know who was fixing dinner for Mom on what nights of the week. When I came out to Kellogg from Maryland, I fixed a lot of dinners, trying to give my sisters a break from this crucial help they gave Mom.
About once a week, if I remember correctly, everyone ate with Mom. When Mom was more mobile, these family dinners could be at either Christy's or Carol's or Mom's house, but as it grew more difficult for Mom to get around, more of the dinners happened at her home at 516 W. Cameron.
After Mom died, my sisters and I agreed we'd like to continue having family dinners, when possible, on Sundays. Our spouses liked the idea. So, we do our best to have a family dinner three Sundays a month, rotating between our three houses. We all enjoy cooking for each other and trying out different ideas and it's a good time for us to find out what's happening with each other, in case we didn't see each other much during the previous week.
When the Deke and I hosted our first family dinner, I wanted one thing to be similar to what I'd known as a youngster at family dinner and I wanted one thing to be different.
Before I write what I was thinking of, I should say a few words about how I remember family dinners when my sisters and I were growing up. When we could, we ate as a family at the dinner table, but it wasn't always possible, thanks largely to things Christy and I did outside the home. For example, during my sophomore and junior years of high school, I worked part-time at the IGA store. If Wednesday was stock day, I always worked Wednesday after school to help stock shelves with the new load of freight that came in. Friday was pay day at the Bunker Hill so, unless I had obligations with the pep band and until basketball season started, I worked Fridays after school. I also picked up shifts on the weekends, especially on Sunday.
So, I'm not sure exactly how it is that I have so many memories, mostly of sensations and feelings, associated in my mind with Sunday dinners at 516 W. Cameron. Maybe these dinners happened more often when Christy and I were in junior high or grade school. But, my feelings and sensory memories are strong, even if my memory of when these dinners happened is weak.
Mostly I remember the steam.
Often Mom cooked special Sunday dinners. Her work steamed up the kitchen and living room because sometimes she made ham and navy bean soup, starting with dry beans that had to be cooked in boiling water and then the soup itself was steamy; steam also formed from the beef stew or vegetable beef soup she made on some Sundays or from the chili she cooked on others, again starting with dry kidney beans. She also heated up the kitchen by baking homemade bread or dinner rolls and, on my favorite Sundays, homemade cinnamon rolls.
We ate dinner in the kitchen. So it was with flushed faces that we sat down as Mom served us bowls of soup or stew or chili from the stove and as we spread the rapidly softening butter sitting on the table onto our fresh out of the oven slices of bread or dinner rolls.
Thanks to the heat in the kitchen and the savory saltiness of these meals, Mom had plenty of milk on hand and I not only greedily devoured all the soup and bread I could, I also remember the cool and quenching refreshment of the tall glasses of cold milk I gulped down.
When the Deke and I prepare family dinner, I always hope that we can serve food that offers the same sense of depth and substance that these meals Mom prepared did. Often, it was eating these meals that made me feel the most secure at home, taken care of the best, that gave me my surest sense of belonging.
I'm certain that my newfound love for preparing soup stocks is connected with these feelings. Not only do I want the food I prepare with these stocks to satisfy my love of good tasting food, but I also hope it will feed a more spiritual hunger I have to feel secure within our home and that others in the family might feel something like this as well.
So, what do I want to be different when we host family dinners?
Sometimes the feeling of being in a warm cozy place, like the kitchen of our childhood, can also feel confining and claustrophobic. At the same time that I felt secure at these meals, I couldn't set aside the things that bedeviled me as a youth in our home. I often wished Dad would cut back on his beer drinking and, sometimes, as his personality would expand as he drank more, I felt the need to escape. I also often brought confusion to these Sunday dinners.
I was confused in my adolescence about girls and girlfriends. I was confused about myself as an athlete -- as I left junior high and played baseball, basketball, and golf in high school, I was an athlete on the decline, much less successful than I had been, and this ate away at me. Socially, I was unsure of myself. I wanted to be one of the guys, but some of the guys did things I didn't want to do. I didn't go to parties. I rarely drank beer in high school. I wasn't an outdoorsman, so I didn't have hunting or fishing stories. To this day, when I get together with my friends from high school, I have few tales to tell that make friends laugh or that boggle the mind because of risky behavior. I didn't close down bars and go on road trips. I didn't jump off any bridges into any rivers. I didn't canoe the Lead Creek.
I was also confused about the church and about what it even means to be a Christian.
So, sometimes the walls of our small, steamy kitchen with five of us seated at the dinner table seemed to be closing in on me and I felt tension I didn't know what to do with, how to talk about, or how to express.
When we have family dinner now, I figure each of us in the family is bringing some level of tension to the table, some level of stress. We are aging. Among us we have health problems. We Woolum kids are all grieving the loss of our parents in different ways. We are all dealing with change and uncertainty regarding health, finances, jobs and other things in our lives with our spouses and we can't be completely sure what lies ahead.
I think the Deke and I had all of this in mind when we had some remodeling done after we bought Mom's house. We have tried to create more open space at 516 W. Cameron by expanding the opening from the living room to the kitchen, by increasing the amount of natural light that comes in, by having more floor space unoccupied in both the living room and the kitchen, by having the living room and the kitchen come close to being the same room. It's now possible to sit at the kitchen table and be a part of a conversation with others sitting in the living room.
We try to strike a balance: warm, secure, hospitable, cozy on the one hand, and open, airy, light, and uncluttered on the other.
It all goes back to Sunday dinners when I was a kid. I want what I enjoyed and want to alleviate some of what was difficult.
This all makes me think of someone I knew many years ago. She writes a blog. Around Thanksgiving, she chronicled fond memories of Thanksgivings in her family home. She is a widow. Her parents have died. Her siblings live far away, have their own lives. Her adult children live nearby. She is a grandmother.
She's hardly alone, but she has no family members nearby to relive the Thanksgivings of forty or more years ago, let alone other shared experiences from her youth. Knowing this struck a chord of grief in me. Maybe there was a time when she thought about her younger siblings and said to herself, "I have great and talented siblings. They'll go far." And that's just what they've done. They've gone far and are far away.
My sisters and I never planned to all live in Kellogg, never planned to become so closely involved in one another's lives when we got older. Without asking us to, our mother brought us back to Kellogg. By dint of bad fortune, Mom's failing health and death, we started having family dinners again.
I doubt we'll ever stop.
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