by Donna Swagerty Shreve
My first memory of a meal away from home involved my whole family in 1958. Our family of six had been invited to dinner by the neighbors down the street. They had three children of their own so I remember the table being quite large to accommodate all eleven of us..
The man of the house was a colleague of my father’s as he was an administrator in my father’s district. Through their friendship, I was asked to baby-sit on several occasions. I knew the lady of the house as being quite proper and maybe even stricter than my own mother. She had a slight southern accent and just seemed a bit different.
I had just started baby-sitting, I was thirteen. As my siblings were all three years apart, that made my youngest brother only four years of age. He was quite outspoken on his likes and dislikes and sometimes unpredictable. Thus Mother sat us all down in the living room and gave us a lecture on proper manners. Mother was usually concerned about what people thought but this dinner seemed to matter more than usual.
I remember walking down to the other end of our block together as a family and Mother reviewing table manners with us along the way. Our family had its unique set of rules and we already had figured out that our rules were not always the same as our friends. A hard fast rule was no sugar in ice tea, which was the usual drink of the summer. My father explained to us that we would thank him some day for that rule.
We were seated at the large extended table and politely bowed our heads for the prayer given by our hosts. This was not the usual routine in our home. We all bowed our heads without comment. So far, so good.
Our hostess poured from several large pitchers of ice tea into our glasses and we began the passing of the heaping bowls of food. Our mother had instructed us to take a little bit of each dish and eat every bite.
We all cooperated with the passing of the food and gradually we inevitably sipped our tea. That tea was so sweet one could stand a spoon in the center of the glass and have that spoon remain standing all by itself.
We exchanged furtive glances among us siblings as we all zeroed in on my youngest brother who hadn’t had any tea yet. His reaction when he did sip made family story lore. He gave no reaction at all. He somehow knew it was important to follow Mother’s strict orders and maintained being a perfect gentleman at the tender age of four.
Mom praised him on our walk back home and the family laughed and giggled at the reactions we really wanted to make. That story has been used to train the next generation and no one in the now huge family, to my knowledge, uses sugar in their ice tea.
504 words
July 8, 2014
Swagerty-Aldrich Family Web Site 