Don't Disturb your Father! by Henry P. Kramer

        In Germany at that time professional people, and possible others, ate their main meal in the middle of the day. The American custom of having a quick informal snack was unknown. We children took with us to school a sandwich which we ate in the middle of the morning to tide us over. But that was never really a meal.
        For our midday dinner everyone came home. We children were done with school. We had lots of homework for the next day but formal instruction never went past noon. Of course, the teacher expected us to do our homework thoroughly. When I was nine, I started Latin. Every day we had to memorize vocabulary and grammar and next day we were quizzed. The teacher went through the class and called on us. If we were not able to answer one out of three question correctly, the teacher would make us copy the entire vocabulary twenty five times for next day. That was loading the insult of a lot of extra work on top of the disgrace of publicly revealed ignorance.
        Father also would come home from the office and we all had the midday meal together. We generally ate in the "Winter Garden", so called because it had a lot of windows and indoor plants making the room green even in the cold and dark of winter. The table was set with a white table cloth, nice porcelain dishes, and silver. For us younger ones the silver included pushers that were set on their little stands. The pushers resembled tiny hoes and their stands were like miniature saw horses all made of silver. We children, with only rudimentary eating skills, were allowed to use pushers to put difficult vegetables like peas on our forks.
        Poor Father, alas, was not allowed to stay home. He had to go back to work. Before returning to work, however, he was allowed to take a nap under Mother's watchful eye. He went to the "salon", lay on the sofa, and Mother watched over him while he rested for an hour. After his midday nap, he had a slice of cake and a cup of coffee, and then went back to work. He would not return until eight or nine in the evening, most of the time after we children had already been put to bed.
        Mother guarded Father's precious nap time like a lioness protects her young. If there was the least noise from any of us, whether a loud word, the clanging of a pot being washed in the kitchen, anything at all, mother would emerge from the salon and intently face the miscreant who had allowed the noise to occur. She said nothing. But her eyes were fearsome. They sent sharp darts that penetrated like stilettos. Her compressed lips told of vengeance to come. And yet she said nothing. And nothing was quite enough.
One day I was helping dry the dinner plates that the maid had washed. I used the prescribed routine. The bare hands must not ever touch the plate. Only the clean drying towel was allowed next to the plate. That made it a little harder to keep the plate firmly in hand while drying. And, horrors, it occurred that the plate started slipping out of my hand. Oh, no! It was on its way to the floor! Quickly, without further thought, I threw myself down before the plate hit the floor, caught it on my stomach, and thus prevented any noise from penetrating from the kitchen to the salon. Thank God, catastrophe was avoided that day.