We were talking at work today about food and dining etiquette in general. One girl was telling us how her family was not allowed to start eating until everyone was seated at the table. I told them how my mother used to put the food out and we had to eat everything on the plate before you could leave the table. They thought the story of me putting a piece of liver in my pocket to avoid sitting at the kitchen table all night was pretty funny. Talking about food and eating brought back a lot of memories for me. I remember Tiger sitting under the table during dinner and with every opportunity I would feed her some of my dinner. There was also a time, when we lived on Mary Street, that I tossed my dinner out the back door to avoid eating. The worst was when I dumped beans behind the couch in the living room. Good thing that place burned down because I don’t ever remember getting caught for that one. It’s funny how times have changed. How parents today deal so much differently with their kids. John could come home from school and tell me how he had a fucking shitty day and I wouldn’t blink an eye. Does anyone hit their kids anymore? The only time my father ever hit me was after a fight that Mickey and I had. She went running downstairs crying and told Mom and Dad how I had hit her. My father came running back up the stairs and smacked me in the face. My nose started bleeding and then my mother started yelling at my father. Mickey must have felt bad because she admitted that I didn’t actually hit her but just grabbed her by the arm and forced her out of the bathroom. That night my dad went out and got drunk. I remember him coming home late waking me up and telling me how sorry he was for hitting me. Maybe it was my karma for dumping the beans behind the couch. My mother on the other hand was the one who dealt out the beatings. Usually it would happen after a big family brawl, Laurie and Mickey against Theresa and I. It could have been after I dropped Laurie’s hi-fi out the pear tree or maybe after Theresa cut all the eyes out of the teen idol posters hanging on Laurie’s bedroom wall. Whichever, the fights usually ended the same way. Mickey would call Uncle Gord and he would come down to pick her up. The rest of us were left behind to face mom. She was always fair. She would have us line-up outside her closed bedroom door while she took us, one at a time, into the bedroom to tell our side of the story. When you finished you had to take down your pants lay over her lap and she would smack us repeatedly on the ass until we started to cry. I can’t recall if she used her hand or belt. The next day Mickey would arrive home from the Gower’s with a new hairdo from Annette or Terry and avoided the punishment all together. It’s a wonder we turned out to be the freakishly close family that we are. When my kids were toddlers I used to smack their hands if they were touching something that they shouldn’t be touching. They would occasionally get a smack on the ass to make a point. I clearly remember the last time I hit one of my kids. It was bedtime. I probably just finished reading them a story about how that fat-fuck Humpty Dumpty fell and broke his ass, and then went downstairs to watch some television. I could hear them running back and forth between the bedrooms. After yelling at them repeatedly to stay in their rooms I crept partially up the stairs and caught John sneaking into Danielle’s bedroom again. I jumped up grabbed his arm and smacked his ass hard. To my surprise, Danielle came out of her bedroom to John’s defense. She started yelling at me for hitting John. I remember going downstairs and thinking to myself that she was right, they were getting too old for a smack on the ass. Maybe I should have gone out to get drunk that night and apologized to John later.