It may well be true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I suspect the same holds true for a woman. It is also true that a happy life often begins in childhood when one is blessed with a happy home. My life certainly began in this way. I was one of the seven children produced by the love and devotion of our father and mother. We knew they loved each other, and we knew they loved us.
It seems unusual that when I recall some of the happy scenes of my childhood and school years, I think of times when the family was together. Sometimes that was when we were all together in our living room. We were three or four years late in acquiring one of the new TV sets that first started appearing when I was about twelve. When that happened at our house, there were more nights in which we sat together in our living room vegetating in front of the illuminated box that produced some rather dull programs. At the time, such old-fashioned programs were all that was available, so we didn’t realize (having nothing like modern entertainment to compare them with) that those programs were hardly very interesting.
Actually, many more of my vivid memories of the family together are of our family in our dinette, a small room off the kitchen where we gathered around the dinner table. There our days were reviewed, our problems and triumphs aired, and our affections strengthened. We were fortunate by the placement of the children in terms of gender and age in the family order; there was no real conflict among us until the fourth and fifth of our number ran head-on into puberty. So, there was a lot of harmony. That harmony was elevated in importance when my older brother, the firstborn of our parents, was killed in a traffic accident. His loss brought us all closer together, which produced many sweet memories of our years together.
Through those years my mother’s good cooking and those nightly meetings around our dinner table truly represented the worth of a glad place where people meet to share good food and familial love. May your glad place be as sweet to you and your children as it was to us. And, hopefully, this online store will help you find at reasonable prices the implements to prepare the meals that will reach all the way to the hearts of your loved ones.
