THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606270039
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 143 lines
IT'S 6 O'CLOCK on a humid Wednesday evening. Kids on bikes are pedaling a couple of last runs up and down the block.
Drivers headed home from work go slowly here, on a residential street in Virginia Beach's Kempsville.
In one house on a corner lot, a dad has just climbed out of his car, checked his tomato plants, kissed his wife and gone inside to peel off his dress shirt. Now he's in the kitchen, fishing around the frosty air of his freezer, desperately seeking dinner.
He pulls out his hand. In it is a hunk of frozen ground beef.
Is dinner dead? Gone the way of starched aprons, neighborhoods full of stay-at-home moms and meals on the table at 5:30 sharp?
Dinner is served later than it used to be, if at all. And in busy families, you never know who's going to be eating it. Or cooking it.
Dinner?
Standing in the street, Sharon Taylor just laughs at the idea.
``Nope,'' says this wife and mother of three. ``Nothing cooking at my house. I cook every other day and I made spaghetti last night. And that's what they're having tonight. I'm not cooking again, 'm-mm. I try to cook like that because sometimes they eat and sometimes they don't.''
Her friend Peggy Cath would cook if she felt like it. She lives right here on the corner. Her 7-year-old son, Cameron, had 13 other youngsters in the yard this afternoon for an end-of-school party, and now Mom just wants to sit down.
``My husband cooks a lot right now,'' she says, patting her rounded stomach. With a third child due in two months, dinner is the farthest thing from her mind. So inside, Ian Cath is in his undershirt, eyeing that frozen chunk of meat.
``It's gonna be spaghetti. I can feel it,'' he says. The package lands on the counter with a thud and he starts peeling the styrofoam tray away from the icy meat.
It hasn't always been like this. Peggy Cath had a very traditional upbringing that prescribed a daily dinner hour. ``My mom was a Southern woman married to a Southern man, and dinner would be on the table at 5 every night. We all sat down and had dinner together. We never went out to eat and she cooked like for an army. My dad would even invite people over for dinner at the last minute.''
That's the way it was.
``But now,'' she says, looking at her husband, who's put the meat in the microwave and punched Defrost, ``sometimes when he gets home late, the kids have already eaten and sometimes so have I. I get hungry being pregnant.''
Luckily, her husband is as handy with the pots and pans as she is.
``I kind of come home thinking there's a 50/50 chance I'll cook,'' says Ian, who is 39. Ian is chopping peppers into neat little cubes. His youngest, 3 1/2-year-old Jarrod, marches between the stove and sink and his parents' legs, dragging a baseball bat and a toy golf club.
A couple of doors down, by about 6:45, dinner has been ready for hours.
``I made a chicken pot pie earlier this afternoon,'' says Joan Murray.
It sits brown and fragrant on the kitchen counter.
Problem is, nobody'll eat it.
``I ate something else,'' says 11-year-old Stephanie Martin, wrinkling her nose at the idea of her mom's pot pie. Microwave kid food in a carton had more appeal.
And Murray's son, 8-year-old Michael, is eating with a friend tonight. Of course, there's all this pot pie.
``So I gave a piece to his friend's dad when he picked Michael up,'' says Joan. ``And I had a piece earlier.''
And Joan's husband, Richard?
Waking up from a nap on the couch, he reaches not for pie, but for dessert, a taffy apple pizza. He eats it in front of the TV, feet up on the coffee table, remote at the ready.
``I'll eat the pot pie for lunch tomorrow,'' he says.
Joan sighs. The 40-year-old substitute teacher doesn't cook a lot during the school year.
``We're into Scouts and soccer, and this time of year everybody's playing and doesn't want to come home and eat,'' she says, shrugging. ``And I've just found when I do cook the whole thing, it's an hour and then it's over in 30 minutes. And I think the reason I don't cook is because my kids don't appreciate it.''
At her elbow, Stephanie grits her teeth again at the idea of the pot pie.
It wasn't that way in Jersey when Joan was growing up.
``My mom worked in a factory,'' she says. ``She cooked dinner every night. It was a good Irish family, so we had meat and potatoes every night and cheese pizza on Friday since my dad was Catholic.''
And dinner took place around the dining room table.
``We eat around the table,'' Stephanie pipes up, ``for Thanksgiving, Christmas and for company.''
``We try once in a while,'' says her mom, shooting her a look. ``But we eat more around the coffee table and sometimes with a movie and pizza.''
TV during dinner? Don't try that across the street at the Fuller house. It's 6:45 and dinner is long done here.
``I'm a terribly traditional guy,'' says Bill Fuller, who's 56 and in the middle of laying some decking on a sidewalk to his back yard. ``I don't allow the TV on and we all eat together as a group.''
Inside, the table is wiped clean and the dishes are already churning in the Whirlpool.
The dinner hour at home has always been special for her, says the Fullers' older daughter, Melinda, a senior at Virginia Tech who's home for the summer.
``It was our time with our parents, and that was exciting for me,'' she says. ``It was when we got to talk about what happened during our day at school.''
It was fun even though everybody had to eat ``Woo-woo surprises,'' untried recipes that their mom, Cris, cooked up. Sometimes those dishes turned into ``Shut-up and eat-its.''
``And we had to eat one of everything even if we hated it. For me it was beets. I always had to eat one beet,'' Melinda says, laughing.
Across the street at the Caths', Jarrod's parents are bracing themselves for dinner with a 3-year-old's quirky appetite.
It's 7:30, the table is set, and Peggy is calling her boys to their chairs.
``It's our worst time of day with Jarrod,'' she says. ``He loves breakfast. He's OK at lunch, but by dinner he just doesn't like anything.''
``He'll just pick one thing and eat that the whole meal,'' says his dad.
Jarrod climbs into his yellow booster seat and eyeballs the main dish.
``Nah, not basghetti,'' he says, burying his chin in his palm.
It's going to be a long dinner. The boys will pick the peppers out of the sauce, will wipe their hands on their pants. Jarrod will try to just eat bread and will have to leave the table in mid-meal because he forgot to wash his hands. And the youngsters will excuse themselves long before their parents are done, leaving the adults to, finally, eat the last few cold bites in peace.
But first, they have to get started.
``Did somebody forget something?'' asks Peggy.
``Yeah, knives,'' says Ian, jumping up from the table.
``No. Something else. Jarrod, do you want to say it?''
So Jarrod clasps his chubby hands and in his childish mumble begins the dinner hour the same way his parents did when they were little.
``God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our food. Amen.'' ILLUSTRATION: HUY NGUYEN COLOR PHOTOS/The Virginian-Pilot
Ian and Peggy Cath fix dinner together. ``Sometimes when he gets
home late,'' says Peggy, ``the kids have already eaten and sometimes
so have I.''
Ian Cath sits down with his family for dinner, but 3-year-old Jarrod
leaves after a few minutes to pursue other interests.
Photo
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot
Richard Martin skips dinner and goes straight to dessert - a taffy
apple pizza - on the couch at his home in Kempsville. At right is
his daughter, Stephanie, 11. by CNB