City Guy In The 'Burbs

Episode Seven

I live in the suburbs now and have since the early 1980s.  During this period dinner time has been relatively sedate, with occasional intra-family quarrels and, for a period, teenage outbursts.  Now and then, when our girls lived at home, we discussed current events when something major was happening, but usually everyone in the family lined up on the same side of the issue and we directed our anger and dismay at the non-present opposition.  Basically, we convened, we ate, and we left, all in a span of roughly fifteen minutes.

This experience was a stark contrast to my early youth growing up in the city with my parents and two brothers.  Back then dinner time was an in-house version of Crossfire or the more testy confrontations of Firing Line.  That’s because we ate with the tv on, watching both the local and national news as a family.  This was possible because our apartment was so small (two bedrooms for five people) that the “dining area” was nothing more than a rectangular space that separated the kitchen (the stand up variety) from the living room.  So our tv stood within easy sight from the dining table, and we merely swiveled it around during dinner to watch the news.  This led, nightly, to a combustible situation.

It was the heyday of the radical ‘60s and ‘70s and the news was filled with reports on the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Women’s Lib movement, the Gay Pride movement, the Anti-nuke crowd, the hippies, the yippies, and other protesters and revolutionaries too numerous to recount.  As these stories flashed on the screen my father couldn’t contain himself.  Widely thought to be the model for Archie Bunker on the popular sitcom All In The Family, my father kept up a constant commentary, no, better to call it screed, on the thorniest issues of the day. 

Dad's barbs landed like hand grenades, setting off volatile reactions from my brothers and me.    We were in our college years then, our heads filling with liberal philosophies, and so, at the table, we leaned both figuratively and physically away from my father who would brook no compromise with his hardened principles and wouldn’t hesitate to slap one of us on the shoulder whenever he wanted us to appreciate what one of his favorite politicians (don’t ask me to name them) was saying.  My father wielded his fork like a dagger, gesticulating at the tv screen and bemoaning the sorry state of the world, neck veins swelling.  He then would stab a piece of meat on his plate and jam it into his mouth like adding an exclamation point. 

My mother had split allegiances of course, and sort of played the role of Switzerland, remaining neural for the most part and praying that World War III would not break out.  

Well, as Archie and Edith Bunker sang in the intro to each show, those were the days.