Dinner at my house
“How was school today?” Mom asked during dinner. My sister and I squirmed through the answer. We were always scheming, trying to avoid reporting our lack of attendance and good grades.
Mom served fresh fish that my grandfather caught down in the Keys, coupled with a guacamole and citrus salad that we harvested from trees in our backyard and fresh tomatoes, corn and string beans that we picked at a farm in South Miami.
Each family member had specific seats at the kitchen table which had a lovely view of a heated pool and an ocean-access canal. The mucky canal was lined with a sea wall and was teaming with poisonous snakes, large alligators, birds, mullet that jumped straight out of the water, and occasionally a manatee. Citrus trees framed the patio with a steep drop off to the boat dock. We had a boat that rarely moved, but was alway fun to play in. The pool, enclosed with a porch, was decorated with an amazing number of potted hanging plants but were always a major chore to water.
At supper, my parents did not talk about their jobs. My mom was a secretary at a school (luckily that I never attended) and my dad sold high tech gadgets at a big company. Nobody understood the purpose of these gadgets, but he brought home small trinkets and foreign coins. His travel provided me and Lisa with a longer leash to hang ourselves because he was seldom home.
During dinner, my mom updated us on my oldest sister Laura who was enviously away at school in Tampa. (When Laura left, I didn’t even say goodbye because I was rearranging the furniture in my newly acquired bedroom and rescuing my clothes out of the disaster of a room that Lisa and I had shared for years. Laura’s former bedroom included a phone which meant, thanks be to God, I could now talk to my boyfriend late at night for hours even though we went to the same high school and worked together serving up Peanut Buster Parfaits, Banana Splits, and Chocolate Blizzards at a Dairy Queen. ).
My dad sat next to a small TV set, one of five in our house; he said nothing until the sports coverage came on. Just as I was drum rolling out my math exam scores, the news queued a story about the Miami Dolphins. Dad screamed, “Shhh!! Shhhh!! Shhhh!!! This is REALLY important.”
My sister Lisa and I knew "Head Coach Don Shula" could dissolve an entire conversation. My dad blasted the TV and even Mom had no idea what we were saying. It was the premium time to go over sketchy details of Friday and Saturday night, of where we were supposed to be. Later, if we were busted, we could easily say, "I told you I was going to the party at Jen’s house and her parents were out of town."
When Don Shula stopped speculating on the next game, Lisa diverted the conversation over to the one safe topic: running practice. It was a boring topic for our parents as my mom’s form of exercise was to sleep on a mat once a week in a dark room in a school library (and call it yoga) and my dad would mow the lawn. So we rattled off details of our track workout to burn through the mandatory dinner time.
We gobbled down food so we could escape. Lisa cleared the dishes while Dad transitioned to another TV set and Mom went off to sew. Mom was whipping up my elaborate prom dress with a matching purse from patterns that we picked out at Cloth World.
Before I headed off to man the phones for the evening, Mom again reminded me to feed the dog, a small Schnauzer named Joey who suffered greatly from the heat and humidity by having horrid skin rashes and a smell that could make you vomit. I also had to feed our white deaf cat named Puff who was constantly missing fur from being dive bombed by mockingbirds in our front yard. And I had to feed whatever unfortunate animals were currently residing in the glass aquarium that was on our back porch: fresh water fish we scooped out of the canal, saltwater fish that we lugged home from a beach adventure with 15 gallons of saltwater, or snakes and lizards that mainly died with a few escaping to make the patio plants their new home.
