My family didn’t eat at a restaurant for seven years—from the time I was five until I was 12. The reason: the infamous Dinner at the Gun Club. The Gun Club was a medium-fancy restaurant in Beloit. It was basically a tavern with really good food. So the customers were mostly adults. But one night when Dan was seven and I was five the Geezers took us there for dinner.

The food was good, but Dan and I were bored after we finished eating. So while the Geezers were talking about some grown-up topic like the upcoming state senate elections or Mrs. Nelson’s recent bout with the irritable bowel syndrome, we snuck under the table with some peas.

Here’s an amazing thing about peas. If you scoop one up with a spoon, and then use the spoon like a catapult to launch the pea, it will fly all the way across a room. Dan and I discovered this through trial and error while we were under the table. Turns out you can practically hit a fly on the wall from twenty yards away.

The Geezers became aware of our activities when a waitress curtly informed them that customers on the other side of the room were complaining. We were whisked out of the restaurant and we caught an earful on the way home. The upshot was that we would not be going to restaurants again any time soon.

We thought that the ban would be in effect for a few weeks. It ended up being seven years. The only “restaurants” we went to in that period were Geri’s hamburger stand and the Circus Drive-In. And we had to stay in the car whenever we went there, which was about once a month.

The reason we got to go to restaurants again when I was 12 was that the Geezer actually bought a restaurant. It was called “The Corral,” and it was a very fancy-schmancy place by Beloit standards.

But before we got to go there, the Geezers made us hold “practice” sessions at our house. We would pretend we were at The Corral, and we had to use our best manners and use decorative linen napkins and we couldn’t sneak stuff off each other’s plates or do blow-fish faces at each other or pretend to spit up or anything!

Now that I’ve told you this story, it occurs to me that maybe that’s why we go out to eat so often now. To make up for lost time.