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Chapter 16 Janie and Harry Hawkins family often spent Sunday afternoons together at some county beach or wooded spot on the ranch itself, they were also likely to gather on a week day in the evening on the screened porch at Janie’s house in Bay City. The time of day chosen would have been “after supper,” in the early evening. Meal times for all households were scheduled , sit-down affairs, and visitors courteously delayed an unannounced arrival until after supper. Gatherings like this were also likely settings where the condition of the Ranch House was discussed. The porch at Janie’s was next to the dining room, and on evenings when the family gathered on that porch, Janie and Harry would have finished their supper. Typically it would be a thin steak, grits, tomatoes with cucumbers, biscuits, and for dessert, Jell-O with heavy cream. After the meal they would put away their large white dinner napkins, folding them and pushing them through their respective silver napkin rings. Janie’s was an oval one with “Janie” engraved in cursive script; Harry’s was octagonal with his initials in block letters, H.B.H. for Henry Boyd Hawkins. I was often there too, a child who had stayed too long and been invited to supper . If I had been in the way, the family’s code of hospitality would never have let that fact be noticed. Our family’s meals had some elements of performance and could be times of sociability, to which all seated at the table, whether children or adults, were presumed to know how to contribute. To be at the table was to make an implicit pledge to maintain pleasantness by steering the table talk toward engaging topics. Adults repeated anecdotes and consulted one another about forgotten kinships: “Was he the one that Cousin Emma married just before the  storm when they lost all their furniture?” Meals were about enjoying well-prepared food but also about knowing janie and harry 113 how to respond to social cues or how to be inventive when none was evident . Table sociability did require squandering big chunks of time three times a day at a place where one counted on good company and felt an obligation to be good company oneself. Aunt Janie’s dining room opened onto the south screened porch through French doors, each pair with floor to ceiling squares of beveled glass that cast little rainbows in the evening sun. The porch was furnished with green wicker rockers and a wicker porch swing, hung from the ceiling by lengths of chain. In summer Aunt Janie kept the doors open, and the breeze made chimes of the prisms hanging from the big upturned bowl of the awkward Edwardian chandelier above the round oak dining table. At the end of a meal, it took only a gesture from Aunt Janie, as subtle as the start of a string quartet, to suggest taking a seat out on the porch. Children understood, more by observing than by being told, that these rituals were not for the sake of formality but to make pleasantness continue. That pleasantness was already in being, and as a general condition should be made to continue, was a central assumption, the assumption of habitual politeness. Social convention was not an onerous duty to them; it was a matrix through which social inventiveness, which is to say charm, found its chance. Comic breaches of social convention, like those of W. C. Fields or Laurel and Hardy, the family found hilarious. Tedium they did not in the least dread, because they were practiced at touching up the ordinary and drab with their fairy dust, the effect of which was laughter. Harry, the eldest of the five Hawkins children and the only son, had been lame from childhood, yet every day he walked, slightly scraping the toe of his left shoe, the few blocks into town to get a shave and, more frequently than necessary, a haircut. The trip to the barber’s was his first order of the day after his breakfast of shirred eggs, bacon, and Holland Rusk toast. He needed a daily shave because, having a weak hand, he was not able to do the job himself. Mainly, however, it was a pleasant walk to town, with a greeting by the barber and his other customers and a comforting set of services. When Harry finished at the barber’s, he stopped in the confectionary called the...

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