The Sacred Cow Bell

(Thanks Jeanette)

Forty percent of American families don't sit down to dinner together at least five nights a week. From my earliest years until I was about fifteen years old, my family always sat down for dinner together. What happened at fifteen is that the family became too large for us all to sit down at the same time, so I started eating in front of the television in the family room.

With eleven children, my parents had to find ways to keep tabs on us and to keep us from running amok. Our curfew was always "When the street lights come on, you come home". Obviously we liked that curfew in the summer, and cheated on it in the winter when the street lights came on at five P.M. It also explains why my older brother was always trying to knock the damn street lights out with a rock.

On any given day, my siblings and I would scatter to the four corners of our subdivision, and because of this my mom needed a way to gather us back in at dinner. Her solution was a cow bell, a large, loud, cow bell. This bell was so loud you could hear it a half a mile away, so there was no excuse to miss dinner. Every kid and parent in the neighborhood was aware of the 'cow bell'. When the bell would peel, our friends would just look at us and say "see'ya later" and like Pavlov's dogs we were off. Within seconds of the bell you would see kids of all ages closing in on our house on Ravinia Drive, like zombies from 'Night of the Living Dead".

The cow bell worked out well for my mother. On the other hand, for years after I moved out of my parents house, I couldn't pass a dairy farm without salivating and yearning for tuna casserole.