Sunday Dinner

     Sunday dinner at our house begins long before we are all gathered around the scuffed old pine table. Sunday dinner begins with Sunday mornings. Just like Lionel says, ‘Easy like Sunday Morning” I love Sundays. For me, Sundays honour past memories, create the present and form future history.

   Sunday dinner feels like payback for all of life’s hard stuff. It’s when all of my young roosters come home…some with their special people, some on their own. It’s when all the tough stuff that’s happened over the years can be brought out and revisited with laughter, tenderness and even tension. It’s when a young voice (out of the mouths of babes) can pipe up with the questions…. “Did you get a job yet? When are you getting married? Wow, your hair is long/short/pink/ purple/messy/nice. Where’s your girlfriend? Did you hear the latest about Stephen Harper/Rob Ford/Whoever-is-in-the-news? Why are you sad today? Did you kiss yet? When did you get that big dent on your car?” …those questions and situations that everyone may have been avoiding, the questions that create a moment of discomfort, then erase the tension and allow us to heave a sigh of relief and move on to the business of sharing food. Sunday dinner allows for a decompression of the week’s stresses. The starving students get stuffed. The childhood stories get pulled out and new memories get made. Politics abound, kids get root beer and grown ups get wine. And there’s always, always a special dessert or two. All the years of cooking a roast beef when they were young and didn’t notice, have finally resulted in the goal being attained…the ultimate plan…cook a Sunday dinner and they will come. And come they do.

   Although my own mother died before I had children of my own, she is with me every Sunday. She’s with me as I peel the potatoes, as I guide the table setting and teach the fancy napkin folding. She’s with me as I sip wine and cook and as I remember her sipping her ever-present gin and tonic while cooking. She’s there as I listen to Sunday afternoon CBC while remembering her belting out the tunes alongside Frank Sinatra on the oldies station. How she loved Frank Sinatra. The memory of her scrunched up face as she hand whipped the eggs for the lemon meringue pie makes me laugh as I make my own lemon pie (with a mixer). I remember the time that a jokester brother (or maybe it was a friend—there were always extra faces around our Sunday dinner table) swapped the sugar with salt resulting in the worst lemon pie ever. Somehow she didn’t even get angry at the ruined dessert.

   Every Sunday, after the faded, mismatched coffee tables were rubbed with Pledge, fresh towels put out in the bathroom and carpets vacuumed, as the roast roasted, and after the pots and pots of potatoes were peeled, we sat and played gin rummy together. Sunday afternoons as we shuffled the cards were the backdrop for our mother daughter conversations. Under normal circumstances, these conversations would make my normally animated and easy going mother very uncomfortable. But with a drink in one hand, a pair of pairs in the other hand, she could talk. My mother had a way of talking to me and making points with the fewest of words and the subtlest planting of the smallest seed. For example, my mother, acknowledging my adolescence was marked by the simple phrase. “You will be starting your period soon. There are supplies in the back of my closet when you need them”. (Yes, feminine hygiene products were to be kept hidden and out of sight).There. We just successfully navigated the birds and the bees.  I have great admiration for how my mother handled my first serious boyfriend years later, who was clearly a bad boy (every girl needs to have had at least one bad boy in her life). She held her tongue but when the time was right, she got out her garden hoe to sow the seeds. “Do you ever go on dates? Like, to the movies?” We didn’t. “Did you do something nice for your birthday?” We didn’t. Did _______ like your new haircut? He didn’t notice. He didn’t last much longer after I started noticing that he never noticed anything. She said so much without ever saying a word. Admirable trait in a mother. A trait I try hard to emulate, but always forget and end up using too many words.

    Sunday dinners mean a lot to me, and I hope to my kids as well. Sunday dinners are filled with warm memories as I think about my own childhood Sunday dinners, as I watch my older children reminisce about their childhood antics while the younger ones listen with wide eyes and baited breath.  I am filled with pride as I look around the table at the amazing assortment of children and young adults who come together each week because they want to, not because they have to. They arrive and they bring the important people in their lives to join into our family, and slowly, my memories get tangled up alongside theirs.