Good Food, Good Conversation

As a child I remember sitting around a large table at my Grandfather's house listening to the grownups talking over dinner. Most of the vegetables had been grown in the garden behind the house not too far from the chicken coop and the railroad tracks. My Dad and family lived "on the right side of the tracks, but so close that it didn't matter to some. My Grandfather had come down from Canada to settled and worked on the railroad. He was a big man, with a belly of a stomach that was firm against my head when he hugged me. In the living room was his chairand no one else could sit in it. It was an over stuffed rocking chair with wide legs and runners, sturdy enough to hold him and me while he read the Sunday funnies out loud. People talked a lot more those days. The dinner table was where all the excitement happened. There was a lot of laughter, big voices, points of view that would anger my Father and make my Mother red in the face. Children were remind