It’s the biggest room in the entire house. The bedroom I shared with my two younger sisters would have fit into it twice. My dad had the builder design it that way probably because he was trying to recreate the kitchen on the farm where he grew up which nearly ate the rest of it in terms of square footage. We had one of those formica tables with the vinyl covered chairs, and the seating was assigned. Even today when we are all present, everyone sits in the same seat. There is a crucifix over the store. Brown. Plastic. It may be built in because I have never seen it move. The clock, in its many incarnations, has always hung over the sink, and the radio has always set atop the refrigerator set to KDTH, the only station that my father listened to. We kids preferred WDBQ, and God forbid that whoever dared to reset it for Casey Kasem’s weekly top forty countdown on Sunday afternoon didn’t reset it in time for our father to catch the news and weather Monday morning. The smell of of coffee, Pall Mall’s and toast woke me in the mornings. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, simply because it lacked the drama of supper. Supper. Not dinner. Breakfast was my mother’s domain. She short-ordered cooked for us, toast, six different kinds of sugar drenched cereals, eggs, steamy Cream of Wheat and all the while yelling for my sister, who believed that eating of any kind was bad, and at my brother, who rarely was up and dressed in time to eat at all, and shifting back and forth between breakfast and lunch boxes that she filled with variations of the cheese sandwich and Hostess products. Supper belonged to my dad. And Walter Cronkite. I truly believe that if it weren’t for Uncle Walter, we would never have owned a TV at all. It was white. Plastic. A 13-inch colorless window to a world where bloated bodies floated lazily down Cambodian rivers and astronauts disrupted afternoon cartoons to walk on the moon. It was a testament to the fact that everyone was not white or Catholic, and there actually was a world beyond our Midwestern haven bordered by corn fields and the Mississippi River. “You’re sitting in my chair.” It was a pronouncement. A statement of fact. And, a threat. “I was here first,” he stuck out his chin, folded his chubby arms and peered at me over the top of the black plastic frames of his glasses. He knew that I couldn’t hit him. Dad was there. “Get up,” I hissed and tipped the chair ever so slightly, but he simply grabbed hold of the seat. “Mom!” “Dad!” And the stage was set. It never occurred to me as a child that most family meals are not punctuated with screaming, tears and some variety of corporal punishment. I assumed that the calm that reigned when I was in other people’s homes for dinner (not supper) was decorative. Like dressing up for church, it was just for show. At our house supper (not dinner) usually ended with someone in tears (mom) and someone curled up under the table in a ball trying to avoid the yardstick (my brother). Thirty-some years later we still can barely manage an entire meal together without a verbal altercation though I suppose the lack of actual physical violence is indication of growth of some kind.