Friday, January 6, 2012

52 Weeks Personal Genealogy & History Dinner Time


Picture from pjvanoverschot.wordpress.com
We usually ate together as a family every night.  Some nights my Dad would be missing because he was a New York City Fireman or a Bar Harbor Florida and worked 24 hours on and 48 hours off.  We had a very set routine to our dinners, we always ate by 5:30 for some days of the week we had a set menu.  We had liver on Thursdays, with either bacon or grilled onions.  Friday’s we had spaghetti with butter and garlic or fish sticks or salmon with rice & peas.  My Dad was an excellent cook, so our meals were always tasty.  My Dad had some strange favorite food items that he would eat every once in awhile.  Like a Cannibal sandwich and bone marrow (cooked) on rye bread.  I had made myself bone marrow once when I was in my 30’s and I was surprised how grease it was.  I still liked the favor but it wasn’t something I was going to cook for myself.  I sure loved it as a kid.  The Cannibal sandwich was raw chopped steak, on rye bread with slices of onion.  I didn’t mind a bite or two or the raw meat but I am not a big fan of large amounts of raw onion.  I won’t recommend eating a Cannibal sandwich now. 
One of the things we did at dinner was word games.  Since I am not the best speller in the world you can imagine how much I loved doing these games, NOT!  Mom or Dad would give us a word family like the “at” family and we had to take turns naming all the words that ended in at, bat, cat, etc. 
Our dinner time was so set that when I became a teenager I learned real fast to be home in time for dinner or my teenage brothers would eat all the food and I would have to eat a sandwich or something else.   Nothing was saved for me. 
Unfortunately after my Mom died dinner time was not a happy experience.  My Dad did the best he could but when you bury two wives in 16 short years you aren’t the same person you use to be.  Alcohol became his companion and these were hard years.  It is also the reason why I got a job as a senior in high school, I worked 3 to 11:30 pm and left home at 18 as soon as I was an LPN and could work and support myself. 

No comments:

Post a Comment