Saturday breakfast & Sunday dinner

Last Saturday, at the request of our granddaughter, Abby, our Georgia Tech Freshman, home for the first time since she started, we all got together for Saturday breakfast. Her Dad, David, manned the griddle to make stacks and stacks of pancakes, and her Uncle Billy fried the bacon. It was out of this world, especially when we added the toppings of strawberries, bananas, blueberries, maple syrup and whipped cream! But the best was the adult fellowship around the table as we cleaned our plates and the kids played Legos ® and other games in the other rooms. That breakfast alone would have made for an exceptional weekend; in fact, Abby’s sister, Reagan, exclaimed, “This is better than Cracker Barrel ®”!

But that was just the beginning. As hurricane Helene approached, my wife, always trying to be prepared, took a turkey out of the freezer, thawed it and roasted it before the power-threatening winds even got close. In the end, we never did lose power at our house, which was a real answer to prayer! So we didn’t need the turkey for Friday or Saturday.

But on Sunday after church, we again assembled the whole family for Sunday dinner. As we sat down to enjoy it, I told the family that it was a practice run for Thanksgiving dinner coming up: turkey, dressing, gravy, green beans, potato/carrot/celery/onion/casserole, and a couple of pies for dessert; not bad for a practice run!

As I contemplated what to share with you this week, those two dinners stuck in my mind and took me back to the Sunday dinners our family used to have with my paternal grandparents, Grandpop and Grandmom Milby. It was fairly frequent for us to get together, perhaps once a month or so. Those memories are strong and pleasant in my mind, such that I find myself sharing stories about them fairly frequently.

But it wasn’t so with my maternal grandparents, Grandpop and Grandma Harrop, even though they lived just a few blocks away, actually, about as close as my Milby grandparents. So, the reason for not getting together with the Harrops was not the distance. It was the relationship; it just wasn’t there. Perhaps I’ll share those details with you in another column, but the short version is that my mother never really felt welcome after her dad remarried a much younger woman than my mother’s real mom. And because mom didn’t feel welcome, that spilled over to the rest of our family — a tragedy, but unfortunately not an unusual one.   

So Saturday breakfast and Sunday dinner were much more than a couple good meals. They were to me, and I hope and believe to my extended family as well, memories that will be treasured long after we’re gone. I hope my grandkids will tell stories about gatherings like those for years to come, even to their grandkids. Can you imagine what it would mean for kids being raised by single moms or dads to have such memories to treasure and look back on? Of course, I have no data to prove it, but if I were a betting man, I believe with all my heart that we’d have less teen crime, fewer drug problems and all the rest of the negative behavior we’re experiencing in our culture if families could only share these kinds of times together.

So here’s a challenge: If you’re a senior and can still gather your family around for a meal, even a simple one, do it! If you can’t, challenge your kids to do it. Yes, it’s a lot of work (it’s Sunday night as I’m writing this, and I just finished loading and unloading the dishwasher again), but it’s worth every effort!

Thanks for reading All About Seniors… see you next week!

Bill Milby is a Director of Visiting Angels® of Central Georgia, a non-medical, living assistance service for seniors. If you have questions or comments about this column, you can reach him at william.mercylink@gmail.com or search for us at  https://www.facebook.com/VisitingAngelsofCentralGA.