The Significance of a Simple Dinner Bell

When my parents died, there were many items to distribute between ourselves as siblings. There were larger items of value and smaller ones no one wanted. There were practical items such as tools and linens, clothes and computer equipment. And then there were the sentimental items. Most of them were easily shared. I wanted this, my siblings wanted that and we worked through the items one by one. But interestingly, we all wanted the dinner bell. Of course, there was only one dinner bell and eight children so only one could inherit the treasured item. But it was in the wanting that I have found important lessons about what remained of value to us as children after a lifetime of memories made with our parents.

Our dinner bell was small, just about two inches in diameter and about four inches tall. It was golden in color with designs cut into the metal after the bell had been shaped. I don’t know how my parents acquired it and when they first began to use it, but its ring seems closely connected to our family’s move to the small three-acre farm when I was a young girl. Its unique sound still reverberates in my mind when I hear other bells tell their stories. I suppose it didn’t cost much, but it was a significant symbol of my youth.

Repeatedly, the dinner bell ringing meant I lived in a home wealthy enough to have food for ten people and that my mother had prepared another delicious meal. She was competent and dependable to feed us well. What with ten hungry mouths, the pressure for creativity must have been enormous, especially considering my parents raised almost all the food that we ate. Dad fed the animals and in the early years slaughtered them himself in our backyard. We had a family garden, strawberry patches, and a place for our raspberries to mature. The meals were nutritious and varied. I never heard my mother complain about menu planning and after her death, on the reverse side of some notes she had made, I found a carefully written week’s menu on a mimeographed form she had created for such a need. She was complete in her planning for the weekly menu had places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with slots for snacks and desserts. No wonder when the dinner bell rang, I ran with anticipation and pleasure.

The dinner bell also meant that I could move my legs. I lived subsequent to the time when many people in my community contracted the dreaded polio virus and adult neighbors carried the after affects of that experience. One had a hunched back, another a shorter, smaller leg and foot, and a third lost the use of an arm because polio left damage in that area of the body. Always and forever, when I heard the dinner bell, I knew that I was one of the lucky ones who could put the pink-stained sugar cube in my mouth and by so doing would avoid a disease that could keep me from running freely.

The dinner bell meant that I had my very own family and lived on a farm large enough to need a system better than calling for gathering the family around. It was a rule that when the bell rang, you finished up your project as soon as possible, put your tools down or away, and gathered to the kitchen. One of us was always assigned to help Mom fix the meal and serve it while the rest of us were to find our place at the kitchen table by looking for the wooden napkin ring with our name painted in red fingernail polish by my mom (who used that system to simplify who sat where). Always there were white cloth napkins, signifying my mother’s proper upbringing in South Africa where meals meant a time of formality, grace, and manners. We were taught to put the napkin on our lap, speak in polite voices, and express gratitude for the meal preparation. Long after paper napkins were popular and inexpensive, my mother washed and ironed those napkins for our meals. It was her visual way of helping us form proper table manners, remember to say “excuse me, please” when we wanted to leave the table after the meal, and to also have a convenient tool for sneezing and coughing while eating as children.

The dinner bell also meant I could hear. Its small sound when I was far away in the orchard playing during the hot summer mornings after our household chores were done and before the after dinner chores would begin, meant Mom had probably fixed tuna sandwiches with diluted grape Kool-Aid (one of her ways to make the food budget stretch) and freshly peeled carrots for a backyard picnic. She was a fun one to grow up with, full of surprises at mealtimes and delicious desserts to tempt past our vegetables and strange new entrees as she nurtured into us a love of the exotic, including vegetables like asparagus (definitely an acquired taste) and fruit like rhubarb (an acquired taste that still eludes me).

The dinner bell also meant that I had a family, and a large one at that. In all the years of growing up, I don’t remember ever eating alone. Instead, we had noisy conversations, sometimes somber consultations, usually parental correction for one reason or another, and occasionally cultural lessons all right at the kitchen table where they had our full attention. Mom was adept at showing us how to prepare fresh holiday grapefruit so that it could be eaten easily by cutting out each section beforehand with her the grapefruit knives she got for her wedding. She insisted that we use her nice china for Sunday dinner so we could learn to handle it without breaking the pieces both while eating and also while washing, drying and putting them away again in her special china cupboard. We thought those dishes so wonderful after the more durable plastic dishes of the weekdays. It was one of her ways to make Sunday a different, special day and thus help us reverence the Sabbath.

Ringing the dinner bell was usually reserved for the Mom’s dinner preparation helper. In some ways, being able to ring the bell meant that you were of value to Mom and made a significant difference in her work load. It also meant that you had learned how to brown the outsides of a roast before it was put in the oven, dip roll dough circles in butter after cutting them with a dinner glass, and a thousand other little, but important skills about life that come when you are in the kitchen with a mother who also was your mentor.

I have often thought why the dinner bell meant so much to my family members. I think I know now. It wasn’t the dinner bell at all that meant so much to me; it was Dad, Mom, siblings, home, farm, and the memories that the dinner bell’s ring brings to my thoughts.

Thanks Mom and Dad for having a dinner bell. But thanks, even more, for having me and then caring for me and my siblings for all those hundreds of meals together. May dinner bells and other hallowed family treasures always be cherished for what they represent, always!