of a Southern Yankee
BY DAMIAN DESMOND
Tales from the Table
My
adopted family has a traditional joke at the dinner table that has been kept alive for over 40 years. My mom’s brother, uncle Charlie, was the first to introduce us to this “joke” and it almost always came up when our families got together for special occasions. The joke is a “conversation” that occurs between two people, one of whom is “hard of hearing.” I’ve never been told if this was an actual occurrence or just something that my uncle made up out of the blue. It basically goes like this: An older gentleman asks a dinner guest if he would like more to eat. The guest replies, “No thanks, I’ve had sufficient.” The older gentleman then says, “Oh, you say you went fishing!!” To which the dinner guest politely replies, “No, no I said I’ve had plenty.” The older gentleman responds, “Oh my! You say you caught twenty!!” I know it’s kind of corny, but we still laugh at it all these years later. As I think back through life, I have countless memories of mealtimes. Most memories are fairly benign, but there are those certain moments at the dinner table one never forgets. Until the age of six, I lived with my Italian grandparents in upstate New York. My uncle Tony and his family would often join us for many of the wonderful home-cooked Italian meals my dear grandmother would prepare. If I have one certain memory of any of those gatherings, it’s that they were all LOUD. A room full of Italians is only going to be quiet if they’re all deceased. In the summer of 1979, I moved Virginia to live with my parents. The eight months of physical and mental abuse that I suffered through has all but been erased from my memory. I couldn’t tell you about one single mealtime experience I had with them. Upon my adoption in March of 1980, my life became “normal” again. My adopted parents are very traditional people who believe in sitting down together as a family for most meals and always for dinner. For supper, the three of us sat at our small table in front of the kitchen window, which looked out into the backyard. Through the trees behind us, the Johnston family had built a house. My father, who sat at the head of the table directly in front of the window, would mess with my mom and me. Pretending that he saw something, my dad would say, “Oh my, there goes Mr. Johnson in his underwear!” Of course, my mother and I would immediately stand up, turning our heads to get a look at the insane neighbor behind us. And, of course, there was no Mr. Johnson in his underwear. But for the five years we lived there it was a common dinnertime joke. My parents were also traditional in the sense that you were expected to clean your plate before you could leave the table. Until the age of seven, I had never really had my palette tested by a variety of foods, so for a time there were some minor skirmishes at the table between my mother and me. One particular night, my mom made me clean my plate, and she still feels bad about it to this day (we laugh about it now). My mom made fish for dinner and I had probably never eaten fish, unless it was in the form of a deep-fried stick smothered in ketchup. Getting me to eat the fish was already going to be like pulling teeth. But it wasn’t just the fish that I was expected to eat. There was something else that I needed to consume if I was going to get dessert. The “onion” on my plate needed to be eaten as well. “Eat it, it’s an onion!” my mother said. And she wasn’t playing around. Slowly, I choked down the horrible-tasting vegetable bit by bit. If this is what onions tasted like, I was never going
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