Missing Dinner

     I miss dinner most nights.  It's not that I don't eat it, of course I eat it, but it's not the same with us two middle aged mutton grazing sedately at one corner of the dinner table.  I miss the clatter of utensils, the clamor of conversation, the corruption of manners and the complaints of my children.  When the kids were growing up, we had two course meals.  My cooking efforts were followed by teaching a course called Table Manners and a course in making Pleasant Dinner Conversation.  Although my kids used passable table manners at home, my sons became afflicted with some sort of etiquette Alzheimer's after they became adults.  If I ever see a T shirt with the disclaimer "My mother tried to teach me manners", I"ll buy two for my sons (and one for my husband).  My daughter didn't forget what I taught her, but there was no way to foresee what novel ideas might occur to her after she left home--like drinking from the faucet sans glass.
    My attempts to achieve Pleasant Dinner Conversation were thwarted by my children's contrariness, my spouse's cluelessness and my own contributions from my work as a nurse aide.  When the bulk of your job involves measuring body functions and fluids, it is easy to derail decorum.  When I was a young bride, learning to cook was an adventure.  Making healthy, balanced meals on our unhealthy, unbalanced budget afforded great challenge.  Next there was the challenge of children. The challenge was not to cook for them, it was to survive them and help them survive each other.  Cooking for them was fun.  I made Easter egg nest cookies and animal shaped pancakes, although my animals looked like they came from another planet or the bacterial kingdom.  Grilled cheese sandwiches were coded, diagonal cuts meant Velveeta, straight cuts were cheddar.  Horizontal raisins meant the peanut butter on the celery was chunky, vertical for creamy.  Mealtimes were messy, but they mattered because that uncooperative flock was family.
     Though I cook the same food, my attitude is often why bother.  We still eat balanced meals, after all, it's easier to balance two things than four.  We visit about our day and no one interrupts or spills anything.  We are boring.  I'm too old to procreate, dinner guests are too polite, and random rude people are too hard to boss around.  But I have no more time for lamenting, it's time to make dinner--and miss it.