Family Dinner - by Dori

I strongly remember that my family, even without the gospel, always drew together for dinner. That was our main meal of the day. Mom was gone at breakfast because she worked at the school. Gary and I got up by ourselves we had our own alarm clocks. We would get our own breakfast and get ourselves off to school. Often times we fought in the morning. He would tease me so unmercifully, or he wouldn’t do something in the morning that Mom wanted him to do. Then I would call mom and she would yell at us and she would say, “Put Gary on the phone!” and he would say, “No! I don’t want to talk!”. Then mom would say, “Gary, I’m gonna whoop you when I get home”. She would get so mad, she would try and talk and he would not want to talk because he knew he would be in for it.

She would have lunches made for us. I always loved the lunches she made! They were stinky lunches like tuna fish sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches. They would always stink, but I loved them! And Gary always had his Twinkies for his lunch dessert. Occasionally we bought our own lunches but not like now days, only occasionally.

We would have real family visits at dinner and we would talk about what went on in our day, Dad would talk about his, mom would talk about hers. Then oftentimes after dinner we would play games. That is where our family got the family get together of playing games. We played games like Rook and Pit. Our folks taught us Cribbage and Sorry and sometimes we played Monopoly. But we, as a family, didn’t have a lot of patience for Monopoly; it takes a lot of patience and a long time. We did pretty well with it but not very often, we played Sorry a lot. We didn’t know dice back then.

Then we would usually top it off with some kind of special dessert and then we’d go to bed. We liked ice cream and mom made good cakes, brownies, cookies and fudge for the holidays. We ate tons of popcorn! That’s how mom would call us in from outside, she would pop popcorn and we would hit the deck running. She used it like a cow bell.