Gratitude

Tuna Fish Sundays: Snapshots

Family, food, and TV when I was growing up

When I think about Sundays from my childhood, I think about spending time with my parents and my brother. Sometimes we visited my grandparents or went to the zoo or had a little Sunday drive. Mostly we stayed close to home, so a lot of my Sundays involved food and TV.

Breakfast

Once or twice a month, we had special Sunday breakfasts together when my mom would get out the big round griddle and make pancakes. She might also cook bacon on the broiler pan, all the grease collecting in the bottom, waiting to be scooped out with paper towels and thrown in the garbage.

There wasn’t much on TV on Sunday morning, except for a local show for kids called Boomerang, hosted by Marni Nixon. On the show, Marni’s son was a puppet named Norbert; he had a sweet friend named Libby and a sometimes naughty friend named Melinda.

I loved that show. It was like our tiny Seattle version of The Muppet Show (my ultra-favorite as a kid). Marni lived in the Seattle area for years after appearing as one of the nuns in The Sound of Music and dubbing the singing voices of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. You might not know her name, but you’ve probably heard Marni’s voice.

Lunch

We usually all had lunch together on Sundays, too. Sometimes my dad bought three kinds of sliced lunchmeat plus Havarti cheese at the deli, and a bag of fluffy hoagie rolls from the bakery. My mom did most of the shopping and cooking; my dad liked to shop for treats, like fancy sandwich stuff or grenadine and 7-Up for Shirley Temples.

More often than not we had tuna sandwiches on Sunday, I think because we never took tuna in our lunches during the week (it got icky by lunchtime if you brought it to school). We had tuna so often on Sunday that we called it Tuna Fish Sunday.

On Tuna Fish Sunday, you could have your bread toasted or not. You could have a dill pickle on the side: we didn’t like the pickle all mixed in. We usually got to open a fresh bag of potato chips, which you could mash into your sandwich if you were feeling creative, or eat on the side if you didn’t want dad to cringe.

I don’t remember watching much TV on Sunday afternoons. Maybe a movie or some old Westerns. We were meant to be playing outside or doing constructive and/or fun stuff instead of watching TV.

Dinner

On Sunday nights, my mom often made a beef roast, a pork roast, or a ham. We would ask Cooper, our neighbor who was like our third grandpa, to come up for dinner. Sometimes he would. He was more likely to come up for roast because he made ham slices for himself during the week.

If Cooper was coming, my mom would make a special dessert that he loved like custard or (my favorite) a lemon dessert where you mixed everything together and then as it baked, a cake part would mysteriously rise to the top and a pudding part would appear beneath the cake.

One time Cooper came up for Sunday dinner, and he brought the VHS tape the surgeon gave him of his cataract surgery because he didn’t have a VCR at home. He and my dad watched it, but my mom, my brother, and I all made ourselves scarce.

Sunday night TV was an emotionally mixed experience. My dad would watch 60 Minutes, which was never pleasant. Who wants to watch an hour of news after dessert? When we heard Andy Rooney complain at the end, we felt glad to know it was almost time to watch The Simpsons. Then there was kind of a dead half-hour, and then we sometimes watched Masterpiece Theatre, depending on the subject.

The trouble with Sunday nights was that my dad didn’t like going back to work, so his mood combined with Andy Rooney’s added up to a grouchy evening. Sometimes Bart Simpson could help; sometimes he couldn’t.

Bedtime Snack

My mom always liked a bowl of cereal for a late snack, preferably Frosted Flakes. My dad worked nights for several years, and the rest of us stayed up for a time after he left. He took a small Igloo cooler with his lunch, or whatever you call a meal eaten in the middle of an overnight shift.

When he got home on Monday morning, he packed lunches for my brother and me before he went to bed. His lunches were detail-oriented, with carrot sticks, a gala apple, chips, and cookies that mom had baked. A new week had begun.

This little memoir is a response to the WriteHere prompt about “Sunday Scaries.”