5pm Dinners

I turned five the summer we came into the US.

I don't remember the first place we lived at, but I remember our first home. It was an apartment in the tall building across the street from my mom's hospital where we lived for about two years. It was where I grew up around the beginnings of the Filipino cult that would ultimately rule my life in the years to come. It had a pool on top that my dad taught us to swim in and a laundromat by the elevators where we challenged ourselves to roller blade on because the surface was so smooth we'd eventually slip and fall.

2013 will mark 20 years since I've lived in this country. Not many things have survived the last 2 decades throughout our moves. Most are sentimental or practical objects; photographs and clothes mostly (and an extensive set of stuffed animals). But this is special...

When we first moved into our first real home, I remember it being bare. 

So bare, in fact, that we didn't even have a table to eat off of. I think some people would be a little embarrassed to admit this, but hey, we were fresh-off-the-boat immigrants. The fact that we had legal papers and a source of income that didn't run the risk of being arrested meant we were on the up and up to begin with.

Looking back, our financial situation must've been a little frustrating for my parents, but I don't remember it that way. After all, when you're five, you don't think "Oh, we don't have a table to eat off." You think: "Ooh yay! A picnic in the living room!!" Or at least I did.

This was the first table we brought home. We always ate around 5pm so that we could have "dinner" together before my mother left for her night shift. I wouldn't understand until much later that most American families ate later in the evenings because, well, all I really knew outside that apartment were other Filipino families whose parents worked the nightshift as well. As far as I was concerned, gathering at your table at the late afternoon to have dinner was the social norm.

My parents would make my sister and I pray grace back before we questioned religion and God and the politics we couldn't understand. I still remember that song today,

"God is great and God is good,
Let us thank him for our food.
Aaaaaaaamen."

You see those corny ads about "Families that eat together etc..." but I didn't realize then and even until recently how rare this actually happens...and how lucky I was to have it. Over the years, I'd grown complacent in appreciating those early dinners, thinking that it would always be there every day at 5pm like always. And, as with most of my thinking from my early years, I was wrong.

This table is still with us today, on our back porch, next to the lounge chairs and the stationary bike that my dad has barely touched since I got it for him last Christmas. The chairs of the set are scattered around my house, re-upholstered years ago, but (like this table) are rarely used.

But...on special occasions when the weather is right, my dad fires up the grill, my mom sets the table and we sit together again...