Three Dinner Guests

Cheerful dinner guests

 

If you could invite three people, living or dead, to dinner with you, whom would you invite?

This is the question that a cousin posed to my 88-year-old aunt, in order to get my aunt’s mind off her troubles.  If memory serves, my aunt would invite FDR, George Washington, and Queen Elizabeth II.  

My aunt and her sister, my mother, were captivated by Elizabeth and Margaret, who were just slightly older.  When I was a girl my mother gave me her book about the princesses, written before 1952 when Elizabeth became queen.  I was intrigued but not overly enamored of royalty.  

At the same age, I was also quite taken with a book my father read from, called Van Loon’s Lives, in which the narrator in fact has dinner with prominent people from long-ago history.  This was my first introduction to a guy named Erasmus.  Most of this book went over my head, because I was unfamiliar with most of the personages and wasn’t very interested in history at that time, but the whole idea of having these people for dinner fascinated me. 

The full title of the book is Van Loon's Lives: Being A True and Faithful Account of A Number of Highly Interesting Meetings With Certain Historical Personages, From Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, About Whom We Had Always Felt A Great Deal of Curiosity and Who Came to Us as Our Dinner Guests in A Bygone Year.  And the author is Hendrik Willem Van Loon.  

My aunt recently asked my siblings and me the same question about three dinner guests.  My immediate answer was that I would invite my three children.  I said I made this choice because I know I could make a dinner that they would eat, whereas making dinner for Queen Elizabeth II would be too much pressure.  My siblings objected that nobody said that I had to cook the meal.  Yeah, right.  But my real reason is that I immensely enjoy my children’s company (although I’m still not sure if they are ready to dine with the Queen), and it’s been a while since I’ve been in their presence all together.

If I was forced to limit myself to non-family dead-or-alive dinner guests, I suppose my three might be prominent historical figures.  But maybe it would be cool to invite the historians who know all about the historical figures - how about Jill Lepore, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Eddie S. Glaude?  Or Hendrik Willem Van Loon?  Nothing like a good argument among historians over dinner.

I recently had dinner with a man who, when he was a teenager, shook the hand of Malcolm X. Amazing! I guess that’s as close as reality can bring me to having dinner with prominent historical figures.

The cat helping my Dad cook something with
bacon and zucchini, sometime in the 1990s.