Day 22

I was about 10 when my aunt had a "nervous breakdown." It wasn't uncommon for the women in my family to go a little crazy. But my aunt was the first one I was allowed to visit in the looney bin. It was on the top floor of Parkview Memorial Hospital, just a few blocks from where we lived on the wrong side of town.

There was a man who looked like a zombie walking up and down the hallway and a young women with long brown hair who talked like a little girl. My aunt told us that she was run over by a boat which "messed her up in the head." My aunt seemed perfectly normal, relaxed even, as we visited in the lounge area near the nurses station.

Despite my aunt's good showing, I didn't want to end up in a place like that with zombies and people who were messed up in the head. I sometimes worried that I might be crazy. I did, after all, have a lot of crazy ideas. I imagined myself as a movie star or a famous writer or a business tycoon, walking the red carpet, cameras flashing in an effort to capture my image.

Sometimes I tried to turn my dreams into reality. I usually started with something small; something I thought the adults might approve of; something I had witnessed on reruns of The Little Rascals; something like a lemonade stand. I imagined cars curled around the block, in line to get a glass of liquid sunshine. There were only a few problems: we didn't have any lemons, I didn't know how to make lemonade, we didn't own paper cups, and no one in our neighborhood had any money.

I accepted the harsh realities of poverty but I continued to dream. Mostly I kept my dreams to myself. Occasionally I would meet someone, a sister dreamer. I would share my dreams and listen to hers; we would weave them together into a shared vision. Eventually we would wake from our dreams and assess our stark surroundings.

I still dream all the time. I have a dream that has been percolating for a few weeks now. It started when I decided to stop making dinner for me and Bill. We used to eat at 7:00 p.m. every night, food prepared by me, sometimes begrudgingly out of a perceived obligation to feed my man (ugh!). I made a decision to stop and I did. Now, if I am, say, absorbed in writing the Great American Novel and I notice that it is 6:10, I don't have to stop in order to make a meatloaf.

It was this experience that gave birth to my dream of starting a nationwide, nah, worldwide campaign to abolish the family dinner. Let's face it, we women have been feeding our families for thousands of years and they just keep getting fatter. More importantly, how many works of art, how many masterpieces have been sacrificed to the family dinner table? It is time to stop the madness.

I imagine myself on the Oprah Winfrey Show, defending my campaign to abolish the family dinner, handing out rubber bracelets with our insiginia. She will bring on a skinny nutritionist to talk about the need for well-balanced nutritious meals and a family therapist to discuss the need for families to gather around the table and gaze into each others eyes and share their most intimate secrets. I will respond with pictures of Anais Nin and Virginia Woolf. Our slogan will be: Creative women don't stop to mash potatoes.