Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take

First in an occasional series on Famous Family Sayings

I’ve noticed lately that I don’t each as much as I used to. Maybe it’s because I subconsciously hear some of the words from the Pink Floyd song “Dogs”: And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around. Or maybe it’s because things just don’t taste the same to me anymore. A lot of food just tastes bland to me. Can you lose taste buds as you get older? I don’t know, but it seems like I am. The other night we had something with dinner and my wife and son both said it tasted very salty. However, to me it didn’t taste salty at all. Not a bit, which is kind of scary.

Or maybe it’s because as a kid I had it drilled into my head to “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” That was a phrase we heard a lot at my house growing up. My parents hated to waste food. Heck, when you’re paying as much as they did for food every week for nine kids, you don’t want to be throwing it away. So they had a rule: you can take as much food as you wanted, but you had to eat it all. If you asked how much spaghetti you could take, the answer was “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” If you asked if you could have two burgers, the answer was “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” If you asked how many cookies you could have, the answer was “Three.” As much as we tried, the cookie answer was never “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” Nor was it for M&M’s, brownies or ice cream. It was for liver and onions, but we never took Mom and Dad up on that one. 

Seems pretty simple, but in the competitive world of dinner time in a large family it wasn’t as cut and dry as you’d think. If you took only a small amount of food to make sure you could eat it all, when you went back for more there might not be any left. Mom usually made enough for everyone plus a little more, but there were times there was just enough for everybody. If you went conservative, someone else could take the rest of what you should have taken the first time. If you took a large portion to make sure you got your share and couldn’t finish it, somehow Dad always knew. Even if you tried to cover it up or rush past him to get the dishes to the sink, he knew. On those occasions you’d get the corollary to “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” That is, “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.”

When one of my parents said it, I would always picture my face with these huge eyes that took up my whole face, alien like. Knowing my younger self, I probably went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, just to make sure I didn’t have crazy eyes. We didn’t get punished for taking too much; Dad just let us know that it was not alright. There was something about disappointing him that made me not take too much. Which is why if “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.” was a sarcastic comment from one of my siblings, it was like rubbing salt in the wound. I not only felt like I disappointed my parents, I had to take a ribbing on top of it.

As for eating today I take all I want, but I do eat all I take. Like my parents, I don’t like to waste food either. Food costs way too much today to throw it away. Besides, every time I look in the mirror these days, I can see that there’s absolutely no possible way that my eyes could be bigger than my stomach.  

Did It Really Happen?

A couple people have asked me if some of the things I write about really happened or was it really like that growing up. And another person asked me how the heck I remember all this stuff. OK, you got me. I’m really an only child from a wealthy family and every story is made up. I don’t really have six brothers and two sisters, and there were never card games and board games; I didn’t have to learn to get along with others, or how to share things, or how to wait for things; I got everything and anything I wanted, especially at Christmas; my yard was not the football field or the wiffle ball field where we played for hours; I went on luxurious vacations every year; I didn’t have to count out M&M’s in a Dixie Cup. Well, maybe in some parallel universe or imaginary world that is true, but not here in the real world. All I can say is, I write things as I remember them. Does that mean that everything I write is exactly how it happened? Probably not, but what I write is how I remember things and so far no one has come forward and said, “That never happened.”, or “This is what really happened.”, or “This is how that really happened.”.

I know I have a pretty good memory because there are times I bring up situations and someone doesn’t remember it, but as I fill in the details they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that!” Then we’ll talk about it for fifteen or twenty minutes and laugh about things that happened. Oftentimes it will lead to the retelling of other situations that happened, some even funnier than the original one we talked about. I don’t know why I have such clear memories of occurrences from decades ago – but can’t remember where I left my cell phone ten minutes ago – but maybe it’s because those were some great times and I drank in all the details.

I try not to make it sound like everything was wonderful when I was a kid, because it wasn’t. We weren’t The Brady Bunch or the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. My family went through some hard times, especially trying to feed, clothe and provide for nine kids. I could focus on the struggles I had as a kid, or that we had as a family, but as I look back on my childhood I don’t see the tough times as much as I see how those times taught me something about life, myself or family. In many instances, those tough times taught me what was really important as opposed to what just seemed to be important. That doesn’t mean I always made the right decisions, I made enough bad ones in my life to last ten lifetimes, but I’d like to think that I learned from my mistakes and grew and changed because of them.

My parents and family were by no means perfect. However, my parents raised nine kids, all who are reasonably successful adults. Not one of us is a criminal or a derelict. Trust me when I say that there were other families we knew that had as many, or almost as many, kids as we did and that cannot be said about them. I’m not bragging or trying to put anyone down, but it would have been easy for any of us to turn to a different lifestyle than we did in order to get the “things” many of our friends had. That we didn’t is a testament to our parents and how they taught us to live.

So did this stuff really happen and was it really like I say it was? As far as I remember, yes and yes. I remember it from my perspective and through the lenses of 30 – 40 year old glasses. Things may be a little fuzzy around the edges, but the main part is very clear. I had parents who loved me, and brothers and sisters that I loved (well most of the time anyway). As my Dad used to frequently say, we always had “a roof over our heads, food on the table and clothes on our backs”, despite some fairly hard times. It’s not all flowers and rainbows today either, but I often think that if my parents got through challenges with nine kids, I can do it with two.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Trick or Treat

Halloween is just not as fun as it used to be. There was a time when my wife and I were the young couple in the neighborhood and our kids were the little ones. We’d take them around the neighborhood and everyone would say how cute they were – my son in his Sponge Bob, Woody and Vampire (way before Twilight ushered in the vampire phenomena) costumes, and my daughter in her Pocahontas, Dorothy and Minnie Mouse costumes. Now we’re the “old” couple with the older kids and we marvel at how cute all the little kids are. It’s kind of sad, one kid in college and another in high school and we’re relegated to the over-the-hill gang.

In the neighborhood we live in now, all the kids grew up at once. We used to have tons of kids walking around the streets and coming to our house, now we get about 15 or 20 kids. And half of them aren’t even from our neighborhood. But the little kids are still so cute! Especially when the kids do what kids do and not what the parents want them to do. One mother was trying to do the polite thing and get her little girl to say thank you. “Do you have something to say?” asked the mother. After no response, the mother asked again, “Don’t you want to say something?” The girl, starting to walk away, turned around and gave one of those irresistibly cute little kid smiles and said, “See you later!” Totally innocent and totally cute.

We had a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating when I was growing up. Nobody had a huge yard so the houses were kind of tightly packed together, which was great when we were little because we could do both sides of half the street in a relatively short amount of time and have enough candy to last for weeks. Well, that is, if we could have kept all our candy. When we got home we were allowed to keep some of the candy and the rest went into a big bowl that Mom was in charge of. I don’t remember how much we could keep for ourselves, but it was somewhere between not enough and too little. Nevertheless, we’d choose what we wanted for our private stash and Mom would either approve it or make us put more into the community bowl. You would have thought we were hoarding gold instead of Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and M&M’s. I always knew exactly how many of each type I had, just in case someone tried to steal one of my prizes. I don’t think that ever happened, but I just didn’t trust my older brothers. Sorry guys. 

When we got older and were able to go out on our own, we did our street and the next street over. Whoa baby, did we get a lot of candy! We got a little smarter as we got older, too. We ate some of the best stuff before we went home and had to give up most of the good stuff. We even got creative a couple of years and would go around once, mix and match our costumes, and go around again. Of course, most of the neighbors knew what we were doing and would give us the “Haven’t I already seen you tonight?” speech and not give us more. Back then, everybody knew everybody in the neighborhood, so even with costumes they knew who we were. However, there were a few neighbors who gave us more anyway and we added to our loot.

I vaguely remember what our costumes were like back then. I remember wearing a Casper the Ghost costume for a couple of years, which was a cheap pullover with one of those plastic masks that made your face sweat even if it was 30 degrees that night. I think I went out as a baseball player one year, which meant putting on my team jersey and hat and carrying my glove. Low cost or no cost costumes were the rule. I also remember going out as a girl when I was about 10 years old, borrowing my sister’s skirt, tights and shirt, and using the smaller end of L’eggs eggs for a chest. I wore a wig, too, but I have no idea where that came from. I never did that again because a couple of my friends were looking at me in an extremely creepy way all night. It kind of made my skin crawl.

Back in the present, the trick-or-treaters stopped coming fairly early and we were left with half of the candy we bought, even after we were giving out multiples to everybody and me and my son had a couple of pieces ourselves. The fun was over before it began. Sure, there were a couple of cute kids that came by, but there was just something missing. A terribly scary thought has just crossed my mind and I can’t believe I’m even thinking about it, but maybe when we have grandkids Halloween will be fun again. Until then I’ll just have to reminisce about how incredibly cute my own kids were on Halloween. Even as I marvel at how they've grown into pretty incredible young adults.

New Kind of Family

My wife and I were talking to some friends the other night about the content of TV shows for kids today and about how family is portrayed in general on TV. These days, family is mostly portrayed in a negative way and usually as dysfunctional. Family members don’t even try to get along with each other, they talk rudely to each other and they are totally disrespectful to one another. There is also disrespect toward the parents and between the parents. What’s a parent to do? Unless you want your kids to hate you, you can’t just ban TV.

Well, there is a cable channel called ABC Family, so they must have family shows scheduled, right? Not so much. ABC Family is nothing close to a family station. Here’s the titles of some of the shows you can see on ABC Family: Pretty Little Liars, The Lying Game, The Secret Life of the American Teenager and 10 Things I Hate About You. When you read what the shows are about it is plain to see that not one family is even semi-normal, and I wonder if any character on any of the shows are well-adjusted. Yeah, it’s “A new kind of family” alright. I’ll stick to the old kind.

I’m not even going to try and convince you that my family always got along with each other. There were nine kids in a fairly small house, including seven boys. Even if I just think about the times I remember most, when the three older ones were married and there were just six of us, there was conflict. However, when there were arguments or fights (not a fist fight, but a war of words) the expectation was that we would work it out. If we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, work it out and get along with each other, Mom had her last alternative – sitting on the couch and facing each other until we were ready to get along. Talking rudely to each other was not allowed – at least not in the presence of Mom or Dad. Disrespect toward our parents? Ah, no, that would not have been tolerated.

We did stuff together, like playing games or playing cards, so we had lots of fun times. But Friday night was a special night in my house when I was growing up. We sat together as a family (maybe after arguing slightly over who got what seat) and watched The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. These were two good shows about families where people truly cared about each other and yes, even loved each other. They had their fights and arguments and didn’t always agree with each other, just like in real families. But by the end of the show, they had resolved the conflict, made up and moved on. Is it any wonder that people still love the Brady Bunch today?

While we watched the shows, we were munching on M&M’s. We must have gone through a ton of M&M’s! Each of us got a Dixie cup and Mom would count out a specific amount of Plain M&M’s and a specific amount of Peanut M&M’s. It may seem silly to count them out, but it was the only way to make sure that we all got our share. I say specific amount because I’m not really sure how many we got. It may have been 15 plain and 10 peanut, or 20 of each; we’ve talked about it at family parties and there is some disagreement as to the quantities. I don’t remember if the older guys got more than the younger guys, or the same amount. However, we all still remember eating our M&M’s while watching the Brady Bunch.

The hard part was making them last as long as we could. I divided mine up by colors and ate the color that had the most first. I’d eat them one or two at a time and I didn’t chew them, but would let them melt in my mouth (not in my hand!). I have to admit that I had a habit that most people would think is pretty disgusting. When I ate the Peanut M&M’s I would let all the chocolate melt off, then I would put the naked peanuts back into my Dixie cup to be eaten after I had finished all the M&M’s. Pretty gross, I know, but I never had to worry about anyone eating any of the peanuts!

Today, M&M’s are a necessity for any family party or gathering. Of course, there are more than just Plain and Peanut these days, but those are the staples, along with Pretzel. Mom doesn’t count them out for us anymore, but anyone who is taking more than their fair share gets some good-natured ribbing. Nothing disrespectful or rude, just a little reminder that there’s a bunch more of us who want some, too.

It may seem corny or old-fashioned that we sat around together on a Friday night and watched a TV show together, and the Brady Bunch at that, but we all have fond memories of those times. We weren’t the Brady Bunch where everything always turned out just right, but we actually liked each other and being together. We got along with each other for the most part, and when we didn’t we worked it out. I’ll take the “old kind of family” over the “new kind of family” any day.