When I was young and still going to school and living at home, it was the first and second grade but who is counting, I remember that the television was sometimes rolled along into the kitchen doorway between the kitchen and dining room (there was no room in the kitchen) and it would sit there in the on position while we ate dinner between tornadoes and other exciting things incident on living in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The TV never made an appearance in the kitchen again until my father retired long after we had all grown up and left home.

I remark on this because it seems to be everywhere all the time and it wasn't always that way. Now I see that people who dine together at home are accused of bringing their devices to the table lest they miss out on some exciting new development while they're dining in company with the family. I laughed at the idea of this in a young family today (I don't know anything about young families today since they're darned scarce around here) but it occurs to me in retrospect why the TV made its first appearance so long ago at the dining table of the family gathering in the year 1968.

Yea, my father the Captain had just returned from Vietnam and he was at the Command and General Staff College as a student alongside such future luminaries as Colin Powell and the one and only way a young Captain who had spent a lifetime fighting in Vietnam could keep up with what was going on in a place so critical to his life was to watch the damned news and when did the damned news come on? That's right. The news comes on at Dinner Time.

Well it's not like that anymore is it?