After dinners at our large tribal gatherings on Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, while my cousins and siblings ran playing and screaming around the house, I was usually hiding under the dinner table listening to the adults, my parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, talk. Because I was hidden by the long white tablecloth, they didn’t know I was there, and freed from the inhibition “not in front of the children!” they would tell the real stories of their lives. Beer, wine and scotch would be poured, and sex and death and scandal would ricochet around the table. Long standing jokes would be resurrected and laughed over again. Speculation and opinions about old family mysteries would be offered up and argued over. Politics, religion, history and wars: no topics were taboo. Since my family was filled with loud, passionate people, the stories tended to be juicy.
Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, all the great themes of the mid-20th century played out around those Thanksgiving dinner tables. My father and his brothers told war stories from Italy and the South Pacific and Korea. My mother and aunts told of sugar rationing, clothing coupons, factory work, and the mind-numbing effects of the 1950s on housewives. They marveled over “miracles” such as penicillin, the polio vaccine and (in hushed voices) the birth control pill. They worried about the Russians getting ahead in the Space Race, and the spread of communism. They rejoiced over modern conveniences such as easy-to-fix packaged food, and speculated darkly on the dangerous effects of Elvis Presley or Chubby Checker’s Twist on impressionable young minds.
Most of us tend to see “history” as something that happens to us. But the truth is that we ourselves, each of us, contribute to and participate in history. We are actors, not just reactors.
Don’t make your kids hide underneath the dinner table in order to know what you really feel and think, or what you have really done and seen. Share your stories with them.
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