Will that be circus with your chicken and chips?

Dinner, for us, is a kind of celebration.  It's a time when we sit down and share the events of the day, celebrate what worked and re-examine what didn't. It's a time to connect with the present, relate it to the past and possibly suggest implications for the future!!  OK, it's a little grand for "Chicken & Chips," but I think that you know what I mean!!

We don't always have everyone together for a meal.  Sometimes, we have a kind of musical chairs - someone comes in,  eats and leaves, as another arrives and so on. We always endeavour, though, to have dinner, at a specific time, have a certain expectation that people will arrive to be fed and hope for the best.

The fact that we haven't abandoned meals as a social occasion, is a central part of our family structure.  The kids for the most part know that they can find us there, together, and that we will be in "good spirits" to facilitate the workings of the family. Generally too, we try to have something everyone will eat, unless we have said that tonight we are experimenting with oysters, but you can have a sausage.

Wooden Elephant

I always like the surprises!!  It's a little like theatre condensed to the footprint of a blog.  For example, my daughter, who is a director of a residential summer camp during the week, comes home on weekends. She often has stories, not so much about the camp, but about people she has reconnected with.

Tonight she was late for dinner because she had spent some time with a friend from an earlier camp, where she was a councillor. It was a circus camp, run by a person who had been a member of Cirque du Soleil.  We always have to qualify the mention by saying, "Is this the person who got married on an elephant?" My daughter usually answers by saying, yes, this is when she married the sword swallower, her first husband. Of course, I had forgotten that this was her first marriage and that she had subsequently married a trapeze artist in the Caribbean, but apparently the marriage, was not a "live in sort of union." How these innocent councillors become party to all of this is amazing -  probably better though, having it second hand, rather than first.

Salad Servers - large :)

The rest of the dinner conversation was about the "flood." We had the whole month of July's rainfall in two hours last Monday and, yes we had flooding. Fortunately there was no loss of life, but people were stranded for hours in horrible conditions.  There were broadcasts to stay at home, don't use public transit and don't drive.  Some people weren't listening!!!

My daughter's second story was about people she knew, who decided to make this a "titanic" event. They dressed in theatre costumes and made their way downtown, in all the wind and fury, to re-enact the "sinking scenes" that were part of the movie.  I guess they took pictures or a video and would have had a very memorable moment. This is not sane!! But it is surreal.

Perhaps because there are so few opportunities for young people to get proper paying jobs these days, I wonder, if there may be a kind of "live for the moment" culture emerging. Since there is little money, if any, left over to provide for the future, maybe they are saying, why not just spend it all on today!!

The pictures - the best that I could do for "elephants." They are ornamental salad servers that my brother-in-law brought back from Africa years ago. We inherited them when my mother-in-law died.

Have an amazing day!!!