THE NIGHT DAD COOKED SUPPER

Dad knew he had to step into the breach and get supper going that evening for his hungry family...

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Photo by Kevin McCutcheon on Unsplash

One day when I was quite young and came home that day from school, our house was very quiet. There was no activity in the house whatsoever. Something was very wrong. Mom was not in her usual place in the kitchen that afternoon working away getting supper ready for the family.

When I called out to her, she said she was in the bedroom. I walked down to the bedroom and discovered her lying on the bed.  

And as I talked to her I began to realize: Mom wasn’t feeling well that afternoon.

And you knew that if our Mom was lying down, she had to be really sick because, like most Mothers of the time, the only way she would stop doing stuff for her family was if she was at death’s door on that particular day. Hey, a woman’s work is never done, right?

When Dad came through the door after getting home from work, I greeted him and told him that Mom was sick. He went down to the bedroom to speak to her and came back and confirmed that she was indeed sick and was not up to carrying out her culinary obligations that day.

And with Mom not feeling well that day, that only meant one unthinkable thing for our family:  

DAD WAS GOING TO HAVE TO COOK SUPPER THAT NIGHT!!

Our Dad in the kitchen? Holy Moley! Our world was upside-down! Was ‘the hot place’ freezing over?? Being a man’s man, and like most men of the day, Dad wouldn’t be caught dead in the kitchen because that was just the way it was back then. The kitchen was Mom’s domain. In fact, the only time I ever recall Dad being in the kitchen back then was when he was walking through it in the evenings to get to the table when supper was ready!

But with Mom incapacitated, Dad knew he had to step into the breach and get supper going that evening for his hungry family. So he began his preparations for the evening meal. 

And like looking at something from the annals of the ‘Believe it or not’ franchise, we kids began watching our Father in disbelief as he started puttering around the kitchen preparing to cook our supper.

When this spectacle began, and as sick as she was, Mom decided to drag herself out of her sick bed and sit at the supper table just to see to it that Dad didn’t completely disorganize her kitchen as he prepared the evening meal. She sat at the table and supervised the whole process, making sure that Dad knew where everything was if he couldn’t find something, that kind of thing. 

As Dad began preparing our supper, my little brother and I started trailing around behind him, following Dad throughout the kitchen, watching him while he was working. We kept looking up at him in wide-eyed and utter disbelief as he was fixing our supper and kept asking him over and over again, “You mean you can cook? You can REALLY cook??”

Dad just kept replying over and over as he was working, “You’re darn right I can cook!” and was starting to grow quietly exasperated at us for asking him the same questions over and over again. And while all this was happening, Mom sat at the table with an amused little smile on her face, trying her best not to laugh as she watched how the little scene in her kitchen unfolded.  

In Dad’s defense, he actually could cook a little bit. When he and his buddies went on their fishing trips up north in their younger years, each of the guys on the trip would have to take a turn fixing a meal in the cabin for everybody else. So Dad wasn’t completely culinary-challenged, but it was more of a survival thing than anything else.

I honestly don’t recall what Dad made for us that night, but it was probably his manly fishing trip survival specialty: homemade hamburgers from ground chuck, fried potatoes and beans. Tasty and filling, we boys had that more than once over the years and were quite happy with that for supper. It was like camping in the kitchen every time we had it!  

And that night, our Father actually proved something to his two disbelieving young sons: When Mom was sick, yes, he really could cook!

(Miss you, Dad. Happy Heavenly Father’s Day!)