Dinner Time Growing Up

I met John Lescroart, a well known author of outstanding legal thrillers, at the 2010 ThrillerFest held in NYC last year. John is a very affable guy, very down to earth, as I have experienced a couple of times now when he's done book discussions and signings at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, AZ.

I became a fan of his on Facebook and recently he posted an interesting little note about his youth and dinner experiences at the family supper table.  This prompted a rush of memories as I made a comment on his Note page that said this:

Dinners were not only sacred in our family but regimented. A family of 6, we sat at a round kitchen table in a Cape Cod style home, whose kitchen was probably the tiniest room. We sat in the following order: Dad at High Noon, oldest brother 1 o'clock, next oldest 2 o'clock and so forth, until my mom who rarely got a seat or waited for one of us to finish then sat down. Dad always took the first helping, then oldest brother, and so on. You get the picture. You did NOT miss dinner. If you did, not only did you not eat but there would need to be a very strong explanation given. Meals were only "saved" on the stove top if you were involved in some type of "organized, legitimate" activity, like Little League practice. Saying you were late because you were playing ball in the street and forgot what time it was never won you a left over meal or alleviated the wrath of dad.

 

A couple of John's fans posted that they "liked" my comment and it made me wonder how many more people had vivid memories of their dinner time as children.  As I said above, ours were definitely sacrosanct and very regimented.  When dinner was served we were expected to be seated at the table.  My dad was usually already sitting down as most times he often would walk in the back door off the kitchen and, after washing up (which he never failed to do) he'd take a seat at his spot at the tiny, round kitchen table in our very cramped kitchen.

 

He's usually start off with a beverage: shot and a beer if summer; homemade Italian red wine if winter. One drink all he had and then he was ready to chow down.  My brother. Mickey, sat to his right, at what I referred to as the "1 o'clock position" above in my Lescroart post. Then came brother, Ed, then me, then my sister, Mary Ann, then my mom.  Food went in that order too.  My dad loved chicken legs so when mom served this dish, he usually grabbed two chicken legs, or maybe a chicken leg and breast. My brothers then had freedom to choose their favorite piece. One piece, not two. I then served myself (I loved the wing) but they were so small that one would barely hold me. So, if you took a wing you were allowed to have two. Mom loved wings too so I'd pass on taking one, but she'd encourage me by saying, "Go ahead, Pat, take a wing, I'll split them with you. I know you like them." This then allowed me to take two pieces, adding a prized thigh to my plate. (To this day my favorite choice in chicken pieces is a wing and a thigh.)

 

It was such a magnanimous gesture. She was always so unselfish when it came to sharing but also preparing our food. I'd often wonder why she just didn't by a couple more legs or even a few more wings. But in those days you bought a whole chicken and made that go as far as it could.

 

It's funny how these memories come rushing back after this innocent little prompt by Mr. Lescroart.  Food has a power that is somehwat overwhelming when it comes to creating and keeping memories strong.  To this day, whenever we eat chicken with my own family I always am reminded when dishing out the food how my dad liked the legs and my mom liked the wings.  Dad's no longer with us but mom is.  She'll be ninety soon and when I have the opportunity to eat a chicken dinner with her at my home or hers I always offer her one of the wings.  And she still replies to this day, "You take one, and I'll take one."

Cops Shows--Life Imitating Art or Vice Versa or What's In A Name?

I'm one of those people who's convinced that if you really like great fiction stories look no further than real life.

Although I'm enjoying the new Fox TV show "Chicago Code" I find that it's probably a really difficult task for their very talented staff of writers to conjure up fantastic stories each week that must first be dramatic (or melodramatic as the case may be) and more importantly entertain the masses.

But as much as I want to like the show and its almost life-like Chicago characters (Jarek Wysocki is the name of the leading character on the show, only one consonant off from the Wylocki family I knew growing up with on the southeast side of Chicago), I find the other characters and their names a bit of a stretch. His partner has a first name of Caleb. Nobody in Chicago I ever knew had the first name of Caleb. (Then again, I guess one could make an argument that my first name, Pascal, is just as odd.)

Whenever I talk to people here in Arizona, where I've lived for the last sixteen plus years, I mention in stories I tell about my days growing up in Chicago some of the names of the guys I grew up with. My AZ listeners shake their heads and smile, many times commenting how "Chicago" they sound.  Strong, tough, ethnic names like Lou Bufano, Ivano Menconi, Johnny Montalbano, Randy Zawis, Jimmy Stablein, and George Rydberg, to name but just a very few.  They wonder if I'm reading off the list of some possible cast names for a Chicago version of The Sopranos.

And it wasn't just the guys. The girls had just as strong and colorful names like Wartak, Sniegocki, Gaskor, Slattery, and Caputo.

But this was all normal.  And the stories of growing up there seemed normal too. I had a friend named Johnny Goshen. He and his family of about twelve people (I never knew exactly how many brothers and sisters he had) lived upstairs of his aunt's tavern called "Wilma's Tap." John took me and Ivano into the basement of the tavern one day where all the beer and liquor was stored, definitely an area off limits to the three high school freshman.

I was in awe.  I had never seen so much booze in all my life. Boxes of liquor were stacked so high in the room that they blocked almost all the light coming in from the two, small basement windows that barely lit the dank room that smelled of stale beer. (Later, this experience helped me write a scene in my novel, Identity: Lost, where my hero, Stan Kobe, was being held hostage in a liquor storage room underneath a southside Chicago bar and restaurant.)

Johhny offered me and Ivano beer, of course, and we gladly indulged, chugging as mch beer as we could in the few brief minutes our host thought were safe to stay down there.  The dilemma came when we wondered what to do with the empty beer cans. Johnny told us not to worry and showed us his secret of how to dispose of them. He pointed to a three-inch diameter hole in the low-hanging Masonite ceiling and proceeded to shove the beer cans up through the hole.

I was mesmerized and asked Johnny how many cans he thought were up there. He shrugged and gave me that devilish smile that made him such a likable friend and proceed to thump the ceiling with his fist.  It sounded as if a hundred beer cans rattled above our heads.  I laughed, feeling the high of the hops, a result of drinking my beer in two minutes. We then got out of there before his Aunt Wilma discovered our mischievous ways (as if she didn't know already).

These are the types of stories that need to be worked into shows about Chicago. Just one of thousands that are probably so common to my fellow southeast siders yet so outrageous to outsiders. 

So how about a scene in an episode of Chicago Code where Cubs fan Caleb has to a drink shot of Amaretto each time a Chicago White Sox player gets a hit against his hapless Cubbies during a Crosstown Classic game? Caleb would become shitfaced within three innings. Now that would make a good Chicago cop TV show great.