Call To Dinner

I am sitting on the floor in the living room leaning back against the couch, hugging a pillow against my chest. We are wrapped up in the latest Get Smart TV episode, watching Agent 86 and Agent 99 trying to capture the bad guy in many shades of black and white TV grey.

"Monik, come and set the table!"

I am summoned into the kitchen and do as I'm told, sliding around the kitchen table in sock feet.  Our kitchen barely fits the table, brought home from the Credit Union boardroom when it was cast off.  I set a place for each of us. Little ones along the wall on the bench, Mom at the end by the kitchen stove, bigger kids along the outside where they can swoop in and out again. An easy exit. A quick escape.

On evenings when Dad is home from work, the big kids side of the table is split and Dad has his place in the middle, just like Jesus' seat at the table at the Last Supper; otherwise, the order is the same.

I climb up onto the kitchen counter to get my supplies - cups, plates. Into the big, heavy drawer for the cutlery, I try to select ones that match. Back over to the table, hurrying in order to get back to the TV, I set carefully.  I want to do it right. I take care to make sure the blade of the knife faces in, towards the plate. The spoon to the right of the knife, fork away over to the left of the knife with room for the plate in the middle. The cup above the knife. Where possible, cutlery matching for that place setting. Big brothers get the settings that don't match - they won't notice, or care, anyway. Little spoons for the bench side of the table, big spoons for the other side.

Checking on the progress of the meal, I can tell it's not  ready yet so I race back into the living room to join my brothers. Finding my spot has been taken, I don't push it this time and just slide down in the closest spot.  John wiggles over a little, but doesn't say anything; Paul is oblivious. Agent 86 is on his shoe phone and we don't want to miss anything.

"Boys, come for dinner!"

There it is, the call to the evening meal. Our family dinner. This is the call for dinner that I have heard almost every single day of all 12 years that I have been on this earth. If I am in the kitchen, I might be asked to call the boys for dinner. If one of the boys is in the kitchen, he is asked to call the boys for dinner. And when my Mother calls, it is always the same - "Boys, come for dinner!"

Today, I think to myself, I will wait. I will wait until she calls for the girls. Oh, hang on, there's only me... well, still. I will wait until she calls for me, or for girls, or even just girl. I am angry. Angry at my Mother for not calling me, for not calling girls. For NEVER calling girls - or even what about calling 'kids' or 'children' (we're not goats either, after all). A self-professed tom-boy, it shouldn't bother me that I'm included with the boys, but somehow it does. By this time I've worked myself up into a lather. I don't want to go, but I'm hungry too - it's been a long time since lunch - and at the same time I don't really want to get into trouble. This might not be worth getting the wooden spoon.

Finally I stomp into the kitchen, knowing that my call for dinner will never come and that there's a fine line before I am officially LATE for dinner. I get a glare from my Mother from across the kitchen table. Now I see, I have crossed the line and I am in trouble after all.

"Why do always call just the boys? You never call girls, or me!" I challenge, cringing a little inside as I worry what my defiant display will create in my Mother. My cheeks are hot and I can feel the heat in them, my armpits prickly as the "fight or flight" response is kicking in. I slide in to the vacant seat at the end of the bench, on the little kids side of the table. My older brothers look up, amused, wondering what my fuss is about. My younger brothers either haven't noticed yet, because there is no fireworks, or if they do notice they are quiet so as not to attract any attention to themselves. I notice I'm still holding my breath as I'm uncertain what response I will get.

Today, I am lucky. She sighs and shakes her head slowly, exasperated with me. As usual.

"What do you want me to say," she demands suddenly, chin jutting forward, eyes like dark beads, pausing in the middle of passing the salad bowl. Suddenly I'm on the spot - all eyes at the table are on me and I feel so small.

Like a deer in the headlights, my eyes are wide and I feel my mouth open and close as I grasp at words. Like a goldfish, my mouth is moving but there's no sound. I know I won't be able to make her understand how I feel, how the call to dinner makes me feel, how it is to be not even recognized as a girl growing up in a house of boys, long deserted by older sisters who got out when the getting was good.  I don't blame them.

"Nothing," I stammer, hoping that will do and knowing it doesn't make any sense. I just need to get the heat away from me. I don't want the wooden spoon, not with everyone here, all the boys watching; I don't want to be humiliated and hurt like that. Not even for my own principles, what few I know of.

"Okay, then," she softens, placing the bowl back on the table and my crisis has been averted.

***

I spoke with my sister Anne after I posted this story.

"You didn't finish it," she said.

At the time, I said that yes I had, it was just a short vignette, it was finished. That's all there was. But on further reflection, I realize that I DO have more to add to this story, to finish it.  So, here it is.

My Mom is 86 now, going on 87, and over this last Christmas I had the opportunity to spend two weeks with her. It had been many years since I had been home at Christmas, and I was looking forward to spending some quiet time with her - knitting, reading, that sort of thing. I was also hoping to "help out" a little. She was recently put on some new medication and had just given up her drivers license, and I was glad to do a little bit to ease the holiday pressure on my siblings.

After cleaning and, mostly, organizing the kitchen cupboards, I had my eye on clearing out the back bedroom.  The Boys Room, as some of you might recognize from an earlier Little Monik story. It has long ago been emptied of its built in closets and bunk beds, but the wall-to-wall desk and drawers are still there and they have become great for stashing things. Mom is still knitting and sewing, so the room also contains her ironing board and sewing machine. I asked if she'd mind if I just got it all organized - basically re-purpose it into a big Craft Room. She thought that sounded okay.

I warned her that it would start to look worse before it got better, but she was alright with that and in I went. There were many plastic bins that had been brought in for me, expressly for sorting. So I sorted - paper in this pile, material in this bin, wool in this bin, patterns in these boxes... and oh my goodness, what an amazing button collection!

"Take it," Mom offered when I told her I was jealous of her button tin, but I declined.

"You're still using them! You never know when a button will make just the right nose for a stuffed doll or for a new little girls dress or boys sweater! You still need them."

"That's true," she acknowledged.

It gets dark early in winter, but the overhead fluorescent bulbs kept the room bright and I could have been on another planet. I do like to sort, and to organize. And I sorted. And I organized.

Mom came into the room often, checking on my progress. Sometimes she left me a snack.

"Hard to believe there's so much in here," she said, walking back into the room once, and I wasn't sure if she said it to herself or to me.

"Yes," I agreed. "Lots of memories, I bet."

"Yes," she answered. We both stood for a moment, then. This was the house I grew up in and although I had left it for the past 35 years, she had remained and had seen the rest of her sons through this room. Had said goodbye to her husband, my Dad, who had lay dying in the room just opposite, about 30 years ago. I knew that I could hear all their voices echoing, the laughter, the tears... I could only imagine what she was hearing and feeling.

Then, looking up at me with a smile she reached out for my hand.

"Let's go have dinner."

***

I love you, Mom.

Lions Dock

It's so HOT!  I've been weeding in the garden for so long, I feel like I was planted there myself.  Mom says we have to each weed a row of the garden before we can go swimming, which doesn't seem right since it's only Paul and John and Francis and me here in the garden.  I just KNOW that the other boys have already gone swimming, gotten away free without having to do any weeding.  It's not fair, but there's no use whining about it now.  We're stuck here among the beans and carrot tops, the peas and radishes.

I've got a row of carrots to weed, and its hard to tell the weeds from the carrots till I pull some out and see if there's a small orange bit of carrot or not.  If I do, with a quick scrub on my shorts to get the dirt off I have a nice little snack.  Paul has a row of beans, and since they're already good sized plants, he's just zooming through his row.  You'd think that would encourage me to go faster, to keep up with him, but somehow it doesn't - probably because of the way he is teasing me.

"Oh, the lake is going to feel so GOOD, so nice and COOL," Paul says loudly, eyes closed and smiling to himself for our benefit as he reaches the last few plants in his row.

John and Frances are sharing a row of radishes, which I have to admit are at least as hard to weed as my row of carrots.  But their little fingers are making short work of it, and they're just ahead of me.  I think I must be paying too much attention as I try to separate carrots from weeds.

Paul finishes first and makes a mad dash away from the garden, calling over to the house,"Mom!  I'm done! Going swimming!"

He snaps a towel from the clothesline, pins popping up like popcorn with no lid into the air after him.  He slings the towel around his neck like a scarf and hops on his bike.  He's doing loops in the yard though, so I suppose that Mom has called to him  to wait for the rest of us so that we can all go together.

Finally, John, Frances and I finish our rows.  Racing to the house, we pause briefly at the garden hose and take a long, cool drink.  Some days we'll play with the cool water for a while, turning it on and off while another is trying to take a drink, to see if we can make the water go up their nose, but not today.  The beach is waiting!

Although Paul is on his bike, the rest of us are walking.  We don't all have working bikes, it depends on what Peter, Pat or Phil have been able to fix up.  We're like a mini parade on the way to the beach:  John is wearing his towel like a swami's hat, Francis has his towel tied around his neck like a cape, and I've chosen to wear mine the same as Paul's - like a hot scarf.

We walk down the road towards town and the beach, following Paul. I can feel the heat of the pavement through my flip flops. We can smell the tar as the heat waves the scent up from the pavement.  The tar is hot enough in some patches that we leave a print.  Watching the melting tar on the road reminds us to walk carefully; usually at least one of us stubs a toe on this walk.  Once I even stubbed my toe right through my running shoe!

"When I get there, I'm going to run right in without stopping!" says Francis.

"I'm going to run right up the Lions Dock and jump in at the first ladder!" says John.

"Yeah," I say, "And I'm going to run up the dock too, and jump in at the second ladder!"

We've been to the Lions Dock so many times, we know how deep it is at each ladder and where it's over our heads.  We have all taken some swimming lessons, but I'm only at "advanced dog paddle" as my brother Pat would say.  I won't jump in from any ladder past the second one, because beyond there the water is way over my head.

We leave the heat of the road for a trail through the bush.  Paul has waited for us there, in the shade with his bike. The bush trail is a great shortcut that will take us the rest of the way - it comes out at the Trailer Park, right across from the beach.  The shade is so much more comfortable than the bright, hot sunshine and we slow down a little, to cool off.  On the path along the way we see big splats of blueberries that Paul tells us is bear poop! After first checking the nearby bushes for bears, we laugh and laugh, joking about the poor bear with his watery blue poop problem.

We finally arrive at the beach, hot, dry and even more dusty, a quick look both ways before we cross the road then throw our towels down on the sand, kick off flip flops and launch into the water.  Each of us enters the water as planned, with plenty of whooping and laughing along the way - the relief of the cool water evident in our increase of activity.

Lions Dock looks like a big, flat lollypop on the water, with a big diving tower at the end. The big boys like to stand at the end of Lions Dock and wrestle, pushing or pulling each other in, or running and sliding off the slippery boards right into the water, or daring each other to do a flip or dive or something from the top of the big tower. One time I even saw a kid ride his bike right from the beach to the end of the dock and into the lake!  I don't know if he ever got it out.

I once asked my mom why it was called Lions Dock and she said it was named after the group of men who built it, the Lions Club.  I don't really understand why a group of men is called a Lions Club, but it's a neat name for our dock.  I think there should be a sculpture of a Lion at the dock, a Fierce Lion, fierce like the boys that climb up the tower at the end of the dock and are the King of the Dock until they get pushed off by a new King.

I'll go to the end of the dock to watch if my older brothers are there, Pete and Pat usually in the crowd of boys.  Philip sometimes, too.  Paul goes too, but like me is always watching to be sure he has an escape route back down the dock.  We don't want to "accidentally" get pushed in!  I like to think that my brothers wouldn't let that happen, but I know that I'd better take care of myself.  We don't acknowledge each other - there at the end of the dock everyone is on their own.

Once the initial cooling-down period is complete, we settle in to beach activities.  Frank and John do some beachcombing.  I like to do that too, especially if they find anything good, like money.  Most of the time though, they are just chasing minnows, or searching for neat rocks. I do the same, but don't last as long before I have to dive into the water again, then back on to the towel to recharge with the heat from the sunshine.  Tom is here too; he's got his towel spread out and he's busy reading a book.  He is prepared for an afternoon.

Across the road from the beach, there's a little concession stand.  At the concession you can watch as the lady behind the counter makes cotton candy!  It's magical.  As we hang over the counter to watch, we can hear a snapping sound as the candy starts to build on the paper spool. We love the sweet smell of the sugar, the bright pink colour of the candy as she waves the paper spool around and around in the big spinning bowl, slowly building a sticky spider web globe of cotton candy.   That wonderful, sweet taste as the spidery threads melt in your mouth.  We don't get it often, but if we are lucky  enough to find some change on the beach or along the roadside that's how we'll spend it.

As the sun drops a little, my dad arrives there at the beach on Rabbit Lake.  We are all as brown as golden marshmallows from being in the sun all day - in the garden, laughing and playing in the water, and running up and down the Lions Dock.  We run over to see him and try to get him to come in for a swim, but he never does.  He watches as we show off for him, calling out for him to watch this, Dad! as we practice some of our better moves from dock into water.

"Your mother has supper ready," he finally tells us, "Go and let your brothers know it's time to come home."

Paul takes the job as it gives him a chance for one last jump in the water.  I take my dad's hand and we cross the road together, back over to the parking lot near the concession stand and to our big green station wagon.  In no time all of us walkers are in the car, windows rolled down in the hot still air of late afternoon, damp towels spread over sticky hot car seats.  Paul, Pat and Peter have picked up their bicycles and started a race back through the trail to see if they can get home before the rest of us in the car.

They do.