I made Italian Dinner 101 the other night. You know what I mean: pasta (whatever you have), sauce (homemade, bottled, with or without meatballs), garlic bread (mandatory) and salad (optional). It’s a no-brainer, you can make it in your sleep, yet it’s a meal that for so many of us is laden with context and dripping with meaning and memory. This is often your maiden voyage in the kitchen, the meal you cut your teeth on as an adult cook, the Sure Thing whipped up for first dates at your first apartment. ID101 is the stuff young dinner parties are made of.

For me, ID101 will always conjure up a summer evening of 1983. I was fifteen, my parents were away somewhere, and my brother, his friend Jim, and Jim’s girlfriend Anna were making spaghetti. There they were, these three adults, and I laugh writing that because they seemed unequivocally adult to me, but their average age couldn’t have been more than 20. With blithe, chatty confidence they were in my mother’s kitchen, putting water on to boil, chopping onions and garlic, concocting sauce, slathering Italian bread with butter and garlic powder and wrapping it in foil to put in the oven, washing lettuce for a salad. They were making dinner. They were having a party.

And I was invited.

To me, this was not only the coolest thing ever, but it became all I wanted to do someday: have a few friends over and make a pasta dinner on a summer night. I remember tearing apart my dresser and closet because Anna had on a sundress, Jim was wearing aftershave, and my brother was in the shower: clearly, this was an occasion. I’d been let behind the velvet rope and I wanted to look nice. What I came up with probably involved a peasant skirt, and definitely there was a lot of mousse and eyeliner and drugstore perfume, but I walked into the kitchen as Anna was breaking a fistful of spaghetti into the pot, and she glanced at me…thirty years later I can still see her at the stove and hear the way she said, “Oh don’t you look nice?”

She asked if I could find candles for the table and light them. I scurried off. There was no salad dressing but have no fear, Little Sister is here: my Mom had taught me to make dressing when I was like six, so I got out the cruet and the vinegar, mustard, dried oregano, worcestershire and oil, and the salad was dressed. When Anna needed a bread knife, a colander, a grater for the cheese, I reached into drawers and cabinets to procure immediately. When Jim couldn’t find the corkscrew, I knew where it was. When my brother came out with two shirts and asked “This one? Or that one?” I said that one and Anna nodded, yes, definitely that one. Jim said, “We need music,” and I fetched my tapedeck from my room and tuned it to the radio. There was no A/C in our house in that day, the boiling water and the heated oven made the little kitchen into a sauna. We opened windows and sliding doors and turned on fans. The cat got underfoot. Anna and Jim canoodled and I amended my visions of the future to include a boyfriend, preferably one who could cook, but I’d settle for one who’d kiss my neck while I was cooking and I’d playfully shoo him out of the way as Anna was doing. Exactly the way Anna was doing, that was going to be me someday.

Finally, we sat down at our round dining room table to feast. Anna sat in my mother’s usual place, plating up and passing. Jim poured wine, including some for me. I took a sip and it was awful, but I would’ve sooner died than go get myself a 7-Up. Jim held up his glass and made a toast and I clinked mine with theirs. I sat in candlelight, in the company of the elect, eating and talking and included. I was perfectly happy. I needed nothing more, except to grow up and be this, do this, have this. It was one of the top five dinners of my life.

At some point in the evening, I had enough wherewithal to scram and leave the young adults in peace. I went up in my loft and read or wrote in my journal. My bedroom window looked out over the patio, and through the screen wafted the faint smell of cigarette smoke, muffled conversation and laughter and the clink of beer bottles. I fell asleep, dreaming of pasta, garlic bread, salad, the company of friends and romance in the kitchen.

Was it any wonder that some years later, when I was in college, my novel-in-progress contained a seduction scene that revolved around Italian Dinner 101? I had Julie, my ballerina heroine; I had Buddy, who loved her but she didn’t return that love. Buddy needed a girlfriend, somebody really cool, he deserved it. Meanwhile, there was this girl Lucy two rooms down and she was cool, and she too deserved someone, but how could I get her and Buddy together?

Turns out Lucy was no idiot, she knew exactly how to do it: she just made dinner and looked like dessert.

Jeeps isn’t a reader, and when he does pick up a book it’s usually non-fiction about business or branding or the like.  But a little while ago he asked me to read something for him.  Literally.  Not read a book together, but read it for him and report back with a synopsis, because “you read faster than I do, you could get through this in one night.”  Normally I’d ignore that kind of thing but this particular book happened to be about something we’d been struggling with.  Namely:  we’re raising a family, but really, what the fuck are we doing?!

Patrick Lencioni, founder and president of The Table Group, has authored several books about strategies for business health and success.  But in The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family, he turns those strategies and principles around to the one of the most important organizations in life:  the family.  He observes that even successful people who apply strategies and long-term thinking at work do not implement plans and goals for their own household.  We accept family chaos as status quo, and put up with levels of confusion and disorganization and craziness at home that would not be tolerated at work.

So I read it.  I didn’t care for the fictionalized account of the imaginary family’s journey to find its core principles, rather I preferred Lencioni’s own voice in the last 30 pages or so, which was when I found myself taking notes.  Treating the whole thing like a business project, I downloaded the book onto Jeeps’ iPad and highlighted the key passages.  As he left for the train station, I tucked my notes (re-copied onto one sheet of paper) into his jacket pocket.  “Do your homework on the train,” I cooed, “there’ll be a meeting after dinner tonight.”

So after we were done eating, we opened a bottle of wine, ignored the dishes, ignored the kids, and compared answers to the Three Big Questions.  Basically what these do is help you find some context for your family life, something to address that nagging, larger question of “What the fuck are we doing?!”  Which, admittedly, most of us don’t do.

“Even the leaders of most mediocre companies sit down and try to figure out what their priorities are, how they differ from their competition, and what their unique advantages or disadvantages might be.  They don’t just wing it…And yet most of us go about leading and managing our families with almost no formal context.  We don’t take time to explicitly decide who we are, what we stand for, what we want, and how we’re going to go about succeeding and thriving as a family.  Why don’t we?  We go on living context-free lives, taking on every decision and issue in a relatively isolated way, as though it weren’t part of a larger situation.  And then we wonder why each day feels like a disconnected, reactive game of survival, a grind without the purposeful progress we all crave.”

Sound familiar?

The three questions are:

1) What makes your family unique?  The answer to this question is going to be largely shaped by your core values, things that drew you to your life partner in the first place, fundamental and positive qualities about your family, things you could not stop or suppress even if you wanted to. 

2) What is your family’s top priority, or rallying cry, right now?  This is not your family credo forever and ever amen.  This is a project or priority to rally around and address in the next 2-6 months, after which time, you come up with another one. 

3) How do you talk about and use the answers to questions #1 and 2?  In other words, how do you keep the context alive?

Jeeps and I compared our lists of core values and unique attributes and right off the bat, we noticed that “humor” was at the top of both our lists.  We laugh a lot around here.  And not dry, witty humor although that’s my preferred kind.  No, it’s strictly Mel Brooks style, farts and butts and bathroom humor to get us through the unpleasant things in life.  And at this point in the pow-wow, Redman wandered over, wanting to know what we were doing.

“We’re having a meeting,” Jeeps said.

“Hey, Red, what makes our family special?” I asked, curious as to what he would say.

He thought for exactly three seconds and answered, “We make a lot of fart jokes.”

Jeeps and I exchanged impressed glances.  Then Panda walked by.  “What makes our family unique?” Jeeps called over to her.

No hesitation or thought.  “Oh, we’re hilarious,” she said.

Feeling extremely validated, we went on with our list of things we held dear, being careful to not confuse core values with “permission to play” ones.  I mean, things like honesty, kindness and fairness sound like they should be core values, when really they are bare-minimum expections of civilized behavior.

In the end, our mission statement of uniqueness looked like this:

“We value humor, knowledge, self-sufficiency, a strong family narrative, and hospitality.  We feel opening our home and our experiences to others creates greater understanding.”

That’s it.  There it is.  Not very elegant, not very profound, not very long, but it’s just a mission statement.  It’s us.  It’s ours.  It’s context.

We went on to put together our rallying cry du jour, and our strategy to achieve it, which I won’t go into because already this is getting long.  But honestly just sitting down and putting together this kind of statement was an eye-opening experience.  There was something very gratifying about it.  And right when we were done our friend Cheryl came by to pick up her daughter.  We showed her what we were doing, she sat down at the table, and we ended up having a really good conversation about family life and parenting and other things.

Opening our home and our experience to others creates greater understanding.

Weird.  Right?

What’s your mission statement?

Passages from “The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life” by Patrick Lencioni.  Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1988