The Trad Pad

It is with a great sense of relief and encouragement that I have come across a review of the book, THE SURPRISING POWER OF FAMILY MEALS: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier, by Miriam Weinstein.

I recently heard or read that Kathy Letts, that well-known expatriate Australian, has rid her London house of the dining room table so that the room could become a home theatre. I was horrified. She said that, if the family wanted to eat together, they went out to eat. More horror! What about privacy - what if something unforeseen invaded mealtime: argument and debate, outrageous laughter and hysteria, practical jokes. All of these I have known to arise at family meal time and a good thing too. But what happens in a restaurant or some public eating place: a child’s terror of having to behave?

I loved the outcome that eating together correlates with kindergarteners being better prepared to learn to read. Food, family, and reading. A wonderful combination.

How many times do we mean to read a particular book or seek out books by a particular author and fail to do so? I have made lists to keep me up to the mark without success. Best-selling author, Barbara Kingsolver, falls into this category for me.

Eventually I got to read The Poisonwood Bible after hearing so much about it. It is a tour-de-force novel told in the female voices of a mother and her daughter. It is a contrast of cultures as an American family goes as missionaries to Central Africa and it traverses the modern history of African self-determination and independence. I can’t remember reading a novel before which had a serious and extensive bibliography including US State Department documents. Kingsolver had included these because she knew how disbelieving her compatriots might be regarding US activity in Africa.

So - with no decent excuse at all - I have not read a Kingsolver novel since. Then this week, I went past an Opp Shop at the Burnt Bridge Shopping Centre on the Maroondah Highway and there was a Kingsolver novel sitting atop a stack of books outside the store. Open the cover to see the price - 50cents. Mmm…. and so The Bean Trees came home with me.

I am enjoying it. You will see a description of the book and some reviews here.

I loved and identified with this snippet on page 88. Taylor says:

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.

I feel this in so many ways - no one person, no one church, no one political party and so on can use all of my parts. I am not so simple. I am complex, complicated, and multi-faceted. Traditional and conservative on one side: postmodern and radical on another. What do we do?