I have a lovely image of a happy family gathered round a dinner table. Dad is carving the tofu roast, Mom is sipping her white wine and grinning at the fresh-scrubbed kids. Then everyone digs in, talks about their day. The children politely ask for seconds. The dog may catch a few stray scraps originally meant for a napkin, maybe Mom has the occasional second glass of wine and gets a little giddy. But no one lectures or complains. There are no silent, glowering presences. No teardowns. Everyone talks and everyone enjoys the food because it's all good.

Yes, this may be a fantastical image, though I am hopeful that my family will have happy, stress-free meals. I want my son to associate eating with being social, with other people.

I don't.

Once Mom realized that Kevin and I clashed as dinner companions, she dropped me. Suddenly eating for her was all about fat, meat, sugar, and Kevin. She cooked real french fries and bacon cheeseburgers, the plates dripping with grease, and ferried them to Kevin's place. She shopped at a special butcher, burning up the moped rubber to get there, for the proper ingredients for Swedish meatballs. The woman who used to prepare hot carob was baking trays of brownies oozing with real chocolate. I wasn't invited to the party. She always left me a plate, though.

Even before that were the dinners with Silent Jim. Was he not talking on purpose? Was I such a terrible dinner companion? What did I do wrong?

But long, long before dinners with Silent Jim were dinners with a man that we still call John the Murderer (if you ever want to read about John the Murderer, Calvin Trillin has an essay about him, "I've Always Been Clean," in the 1984 book Killings, taken from his New Yorker essays). We lived with John when I was about three, for less than a year. Since he only had two chairs at his kitchen table, I stood for meals.

This has always been a little factoid of my life, perhaps made slightly more interesting by the Trillin coverage (my grandmother kept a file of clippings from the local newspapers on John's later trial for perjury; I wish I had that file). I barely remember standing at the table. What I do remember is being proud that I could play quietly in his presence. I also remember being afraid.

This factoid has legs.

Tags: John Mervin, meals