The People We Ate Dinner With

The people we ate dinner with came from different places. This sounds obvious, yet when you grew up in a town like mine, where people are born and die without ever crossing the county line, different was not the norm. Not in Las Animas, a blip of a farm town buried down deep in the Colorado plains. 

I never was able to form a classification system for our visitors, like long hair means California, or perhaps some method of stringing together parlance by equating the mention of a June Bug with southern upbringing. So often, in fact, I’d come home to our modest, three-bedroom ranch and find a stranger seated at our table and from their appearance count them off as someone from here. In time, I’d learn how looks could be deceiving, what with visitors from Chicago, New Jersey, even Oregon. 

“How did you end up here?” I’d like to ask them. “What went wrong?”

I’d learn that answer soon enough, at least as much of one that stands to reason. Someone once told me that if you put a fence around my town, not one keeping people in, but out, that the whole world would fall to shit. Because if we were closed, they said, where would all the crazies go? 

They’d certainly miss out on dinner. The crazies, that is. The drunks and seekers and providers of empathy’s light. They’d miss out on being landmarks of my youth.

Like John. Having parents driven by the strong habit of picking up strays made it a bit like Russian roulette when it came to guessing who our company might be. He had nowhere else to go, could have been the motto on our family crest. 

John was quiet and nervous, acting like this dinner might be his first indoors. He had that look of all single men between thirty and fifty who’d lived a hard life. By that, I mean he could have been thirty or fifty. Worn, to use a word. Like you could still see a younger man pushing out against his outer shell, not yet old, but collapsing in on himself like a black hole, an inevitable process he could do nothing to slow. 

John’s attempt at dressing nice made him appear as though he was blending business casual with Hawaiian luau. His hair was wet or slicked with pomade, or perhaps it was just grease.

I remember being afraid of John at first, that was until the stranger-danger dust wore off, and I began peppering him with questions. Fortunately, John would show his own youthful side when he warmed to the notion of being one of us, if only for the night.

“Where are you from?” I asked as we dined on mom’s corned beef and buttery potatoes.

“What’s your favorite subject in school?” he volleyed back.

“Do you like the Broncos?” A gimme, I know.

“Do you have kids of your own?” 

John would eat with us that evening and tell us stories that, while unremarkable, were his and thus different from our own. I’ve always revelled in stories from beyond. Even from a loser, a tale of the ocean, of the army, of a bad marriage in Reno, could make me believe that the world out there was bigger than my own. That I too could make it out. That I might be hosted by strangers as well.

John wasn’t our only guest. In fact, there were plenty of others, like Jan the beautician from Philly who wanted nothing more than to patch things up with her kids, or Michael with his tales of Hoosier prep-basketball glory, nearly leading his team to the state championship. Our door was forever open to these strays. And once opened, it seemed, there was always someone in need.

Sometimes, though, it was whole families who joined us for dinner.

I recall the Bishop Family dining with us as semi-regular visitors. My mom had taken in the Bishop clan for reasons still uncertain. Maybe it was the size of her heart, her inability to say no. 

Looking back on it, I don’t think the Bishop kids went to school—not real school anyway, one that believed in evolution or algebra. Chances are, if I watched old reruns of Dateline, I’d probably find some story about child brides or religious rituals in the New Mexico badlands within three, no, two clicks off the Bishop way. 

But hey, that puts such insanity one click closer to me, so who’s to judge?

Kooks, maybe. Relics of a bygone age, sure. But around our dinner table, these people were guests. More than what society made them out to be, the Bishop girl’s prairie dresses and Mr. Bishop’s flowing beard were the building blocks of what I’d come to be. Some people’s scope of weirdness is so narrow I feel sorry for them. 

Because of our dinner table, I fear my range has no end.

The people we ate dinner with were not always lost. In fact, some of them were the most grounded people I’ve ever met, ones who knew exactly what it was that led them to our table, and leaving, where they were meant to go. These could be old friends of my parents or new acquaintances, those random few who passed through our town unlike balloons in a hurricane but instead on a more decided tract.

Like our own private lecture series, it was as if my parents brought these people into our lives to shed light on lands both dark and bright. Lawyers. Painters. Felons. We’d even host traveling pastors sailing through on their white, billowy tents. 

Once, a writer from Denver had taken a residency at the junior college twenty miles away. Like my parents, this young man was educated, but unlike them, he had come to our town as a visitor, not a life-long occupant. As such, he was able to see things differently than my family did. 

“Your parents really are something,” he said over steaks my dad had grilled, always a bit too rare. “So many people talk about giving their life to an ideal. I don’t know if I could do it.”

“But you’re here,” I said. “You’ve seen this place that no one notices. Won’t you take that back with you?”

“There’s a difference between carrying a place within your heart as a memory and making that place your heart itself,” he said. “I’ve heard your dad say that wherever you go, there you are, but that statement isn’t quite right, not completely. Not if you live in a place where you’re needed, where no one else in the world could ever take your spot.”

We’d spend the rest of dinner talking about literature and travel, that young man showing me pictures of him backpacking through Honduras and El Salvador. Eventually, though, he would leave, and in my heart, I’d know I wanted to be like him, even though the thought was fleeting. Even though I was becoming more and more like my parents every day.

The people we ate dinner with were often strangers, yet sometimes they were people we knew. In knowing them, when they showed up from out of nowhere and it was so obvious that something had gone wrong, discovering this part of them made me question what relationships really meant.

Aunts. Cousins. Uncles. You’d see them and say, I know this person. Yet these interludes would reveal just how little you really know about their personal lives, their marital struggles, their battles with booze and drugs that brought them to our dusty plains.

I didn’t see it then, the allure of a place so far removed from coffee shops and stop lights. The older I get, the more I understand. Although my parents had chosen to make their lives in Las Animas, my extended family saw it as some sort of ethereal sanctuary, like Mayberry minus the southern charm with an added dash of crystal meth. Our house, a dirt-road destination where they could get away from themselves and their troubles and take time to decide what it was they wanted.

Even as a child, I knew this escapism wasn’t correct. You could get high or drunk or find another marriage to ruin just as easily in our hometown as you could anywhere on the planet. For really, wherever you go, there you are. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t get it. To remove yourself from the norm while still sharing food with family for a day, a week, a month: until you centered yourself and found your way? I understand why my family members did this. And sometimes, I still seek it out myself, this effect of leaving it all behind and making yourself a stranger in a strange land, even if it’s just for pretend.

The people we ate dinner with were not always adults. Sometimes, they were children, and I’m not talking about my friends. I’m talking about other children, children who like their adult counterparts had few places to go, who were brought in by my parents to teach me something, or more, to show me what it was to give.

There is a poverty that exists in small-town America unlike few other places. I wasn’t born into that life but lived it tangentially, most often through the people dining at my house. I would see it over dinner, the unfamiliarity of eating at a table with forks and cloth napkins and food so expected that I failed to see it as an extravagance. 

“Fried Chicken? On a Wednesday? It’s not even Christmas!”

This look of surprise reminded me of how it felt to hear a foreign language, like seeing people act and talk in ways so different from your own that you felt as though you’d landed on another planet. Only this wasn’t a different planet. It was my dinner table, sitting with a classmate who lived both miles and light-years away. 

I will never forget that look of want.

Throughout my childhood, I ate dinner with many people, yet the ones I dined with most were the ones I knew the best, my parents and my little sister. 

Isn’t it strange to think of your parents before you came to be? To imagine them as teenagers, or as children with friends of their own. At parties or going out on dates. As people with no idea about what they should do.

We are born and grow older with the concept of our parents as knowers of all things, yet it takes time to uncover this fallacy. Maturity comes through watching your idols try and fail at business ventures and relationships and dreams. Growing up could be defined as living long enough to see your parents fail you.

Yet even when you still believe in their perfection, at least for me, it was over dinner where the cracks of my parent’s true selves were revealed. Not bad, but human, where I saw them for what they were and understood their lives were tapestries like my own. 

I cherished my parent’s stories, the experiences and insights they shared as we laughed around our table. Like the time my dad got in trouble for sticking for-sale signs on his science teacher’s lawn, a tale he told over steamy meatloaf and green beans. Or my mom, listening to her impressions of the Cowardly Lion as she belted out If I were the King of the Forest. 

There was something in the way they seemed to know everything about the world, and knowing, could make it look so much smaller than it was. Of even greater import, though, were the times they couldn’t answer all my questions, like when I asked them why their marriage was ending, or why we would soon be eating dinner at two different tables. Not getting those answers made me realize that some things were just too complex to explain and that some questions, some questions remained with you until they became a part of you all the same.

Years later, I eat dinner with fewer people than I once did. No longer do I share a table with my parents, and now married and with a son of my own, I wonder how I might continue to open my door to the possibilities that abound.

It’s this reflection, this looking back and wondering forward, that makes me consider just who I’d like to host for dinner. Friends, to be sure, and more children, if I’m blessed with such a gift. Together we’d sit at a long, stretching table, and at the head would be my parents and all the other family I’ve ever known.

And we’d have strangers, too. Some would be there as guests brought in to enamor us with their tales of the world, those top-ten dream visitors whose lives you emulate. Alongside them, we’d have other strangers as well, those we could give to and bring in, and in hosting, expand our hearts a little more as we shared the blessings we’d received.

These would be the people I’d like to eat dinner with someday. And with a chair open, I hope that it will happen. I hope that it’s inevitable, because without those guests, I don’t know what my life would be.

Nicholas MacDonnell is a writer and teacher living in Olathe, Kansas.