Food Time - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/117/you-gonna-eat-that

Dinner was every evening at six. It didn't matter who was home, what was going on, or if the world was ending. Dinner was always at six. If you were running late, at a friend's house because you forgot what time it was, had sports, music, or whatever else was going on, dinner went on without you and food was always on the table by six. It didn't matter what was happening, and even today, I know that I could show up at my house without warning around six, and there'd be food on the table. Maybe not enough for me to eat, bu there'd at least be food on the table because the tradition stands and will never change.

That timing was true no matter what was going on, and it was the law of our house that dinner was at six, except for one night.

This one night has stuck with me, and it has stuck with me hard.

As I've talked about before, my parents are a mystery of how in the world they were ever able to get together. I have no idea who or what made them a couple, bu i certainly does not match anythingin the normal world because the two of them just do not get along. One night, after my dad came home from work, there was a fight.

There were a lot of these as I think back to it. I thought it was normal, you know the whole idea that healthy families are ones that are able to fight and argue with each other? Yeah, I thought that it was just a normal thing. Now that I'm thinking outside of it and can look back at what was going on, that this was a bit more than normal for a healthy family, bu whatever, that's a topic for a different time.

Sometimes i would be between my sisters, sometimes a sister and my dad would go at it, and some times I was in the mix. This particular night, it was my mom and dad.  I don't remember the topic, I don' remember the drama, I don't remember what the fight was about, the thing that I remembered that it was a crazy enough fight that there was no dinner at six.

For this one night, the rules broke. It was the first time that something in that schedule had managed to break the six o'clock dinner time, and the reason I remember that it was such a crazy moment was that Katie, had to make me mac and cheese.

Rewind to when this was happening - I hated mac and cheese. Even to this day I'm not a huge fan of it. But I knew that there was no way that I was going to be fighting this one. As much as I didn't like mac and cheese, and as weird as consistency that it makes when you eat it (it's just too rubbery for me) that night, for most likely the only time in my life, I ate mac and cheese without saying anything about it because I was hungry. It was made by a teenager looking out for her little brother, but still it was the weirdest thing that I remember about all of the dinner times that I have had in my life, because for that one dinner time, there was no dinner.