My family's heritage is Norwegian on my father's side and Irish/English on my mothers...not exactly a quiet household...Stoic, stolid and strict (Father), Calm, Quiet and Deadly (Mother). I have a sister that was coddled, enjoyed and taught to horseback ride...I was a child of the sixties - Parents chose to confine, challenge and restrict me...I had more groundings than a major airport.
There were certain times in my family when you just did not express your opinion...one of the major times was at the dinner table...Now, my mother being English/Irish believed - really BELIEVED- that anything that you cooked needed to be really, really dead...even if it came out of a can...I didn't know what vegetables tasted like till I left home at 17 and lived in a glorious hovel outside of town with a pagan vegetarian. (This came as a double shock because I was a lapsed Lutheran.)
At home our typical dinner was: dead green beans (from the SW can - boiled for exactly 15 minutes), dead beef or chicken (meat must be grey of color, thin and leather like, chicken not only had to be flat, colorless and tasteless, but also needed to have no sauce or flavoring associated with it)
potatoes, ALWAYS POTATOES, the Irish famine you know, bread, LOTS of bread and butter (we did try out Oleo or margarine but papa took one taste and calmly walked it out to the kitchen garbage, rooted in the fridge, got the rest of "that stuff" and solemnly stated: "Never, ever bring that stuff in the house again", quietly sat down and commenced to finishing dinner.
One also never spoke at the dinner table...this was tantamount to being expelled from the table with no dinner (as dinner was described above you might believe that I would try to engage the fam in educational discourse - just get OUT of eating dinner. This was true) Worked like a champ, unless we had peas. Now I hate peas, anywhere anytime anyshape anyhow...hate peas. Mum would boil up a plate of peas (15 minutes from the can, you know) and proudly present them to papa and myself to eat...Papa would eat everything on his plate, I would gag down all but the peas...spent the next 15 - 20 minutes pushing them around on my plate. Mother and Papa would get up from the table-clothed table, clear the table - except for me and my plate of peas and calmly state that if I had to sit there until tomorrow...I was going to eat the peas...sigh.
One day I had what could only be called an epiphany. Asked Mother if I could please have a piece of bread with lots of butter on it so that I could eat my peas..".Sure, enough." and handed me my buttered bread....they went off to leave me to ponder my fate and I immediately pushed all of those disgusting round green objects into the butter on my bread and placed bread under my plate and pressed down, hard. Now we only had Wonder Bread in our house so it squished really nicely...flat. Then I called out to Mother that I had finished my peas and wished to be excused. She came in, saw bread and peas gone and excused me. When she took my plate out to the kitchen to wash it, game over. I don't believe that my mother laughed, nor my father, but it did take them a short while before I got my spanking and had to be confined to my room to ponder my fate.
Still hate peas.
Le Conteur
