The Dinnertimes Series. Frank: Everything Changed / Adele: Fried Chicken

Frank, born 1921, age 91: Everything Changed Adele, born 1915, age 96: Fried Chicken (Sample stories from " Stories of American Life 1912 to 2012.) What does dinnertime mean to you? We each have our own memories and associations when we think about dinnertime. For some of us those memories are positive; for others, they are less so. Some of us think of food, some of family, some of habits and customs; each of us is different. But dinnertime has a meaning for most of us, and that meaning is incorporated into who we are. Whether experiences are remembered fondly or with pain, the intimate realities of our mealtimes stay with us and help to shape us. This is the premise behind "Dinnertimes." Dinnertimes is not a cookbook, nor is it a menu planner. It is not even primarily about food. It is a collection of first-person accounts of individual lives told by people from a variety of backgrounds and ages; the oldest narrator in the full collection is 100 (a short bonus narrative is from a 108 year old woman) the youngest 22. Each narrative is based on a face-to-face interview in which the person was asked “Tell me about dinnertime. What does dinnertime mean to you?” Each narrator shaped the direction of his or her own story. The result is a collection of rich accounts that are windows into people’s lives. One narrator (Frank) tells of his journey from his boyhood farm in Italy to a POW camp in Texas. Another (P.) tells of life with her well-to-do family in their large home in Harlem. We hear from a man (Tom) who lived communally in the late sixties and early seventies and from another (Bartley) who grew up in a strictly religious household only to later come out as gay. One woman (Rupa) describes her journey from India to America; another (Helen) tells of the “non-dinnertimes” of her childhood. A professional dietitian (Kelly) shares her struggles to get her two autistic sons to eat healthy food and a restaurant owner (Dean) tells us what inspired him. A soldier (Scott) talks about practicing his Native American spirituality in a war zone and an eighty-two year old woman (Bonnie) remembers the upper-class Victorian dinners of her grandmother’s home. In this collection we hear about ice boxes and coal stoves, the Depression and World War II, TV dinners and microwave ovens. Most of all, we hear about family as narrators talk about the dinnertimes they had as children and the dinnertimes they create in their lives today. Each of us has a story, a story that is shaped by culture, by era, by circumstance and by ourselves, and those stories continue to unfold as we learn, grow, and live our lives. The narratives that make up the Dinnertimes collection are personal, specific, individual, and intimate, yet universal. Each one, while edited for content and flow, is told in the actual words of the narrator. This volume presents two narratives from the collection. My wish is that you, the reader, find something in each story that speaks to you, whether it is a connection to your own experience or an insight into someone else’s.