“Dinner time!”

“Just a minute Ma.”

“No. Now. Your food’s going to get cold.”

“But Mom, the show’s about to …”

“Get in here now! You can watch the show when they rerun it.”

I came, I ate, and I never saw the rest of that show.

It was Superman. I think we were still in New York; if in California it was shortly after our move, so I’d set this vignette around 1958. I was 8 and my mother was 33.

My parents insisted that we eat dinner as a family, every night. I didn’t like the practice then, and I’m still not sure I agree with it. I mean, it makes obvious sense: time together, hearing about each other’s day, settling disputes, making plans, eating well. But the truth of my experience was that I and my brothers got plenty of those ingredients, on weekends and vacations but also as we intersected with our parents every day. The custom of waiting, hungry, till Dad got home from work so we could sit down together tired and irritated … that didn’t actually produce any of the memories and lessons I’m now recording.

Anyway, that evening in probably 1958, I was summoned away from a Superman episode, to dinner. I recall the show scene – Kryptonite fingerprints on a classic black telephone, black-and-white of course, because even if the show had color our television didn’t.

My mother was wrong. Perhaps not about the value of family dinners, but about me ever seeing that episode of Superman again. Because I’ve occasionally tuned into 24-hour marathons of the old show, and I’ve never caught the end of that one.

I started to tell Otto this memory about a month ago. He was ignoring his parents’ invitations to the dinner table and I began to describe my missed Superman. Katie and Sean stopped me. They pointed out that Otto didn’t need to learn that by listening to his parents he’d in fact miss out on exactly what he wanted to experience. Which seemed kind of no duh to me at first, which is why it so effectively shut me up.

I wish I’d had the wit to describe why I was trying to tell the story then, but it took me awhile to figure that out myself. See, the thing I learned from missing Superman is that missing it wasn’t a tragedy. I flourished even without it. And in some ways, that unfinished Superman episode is my favorite.