By Bryana
For my Kentucky Kitchen Table assignment, I decided to host the dinner in my hometown of Campbellsville, Kentucky. I had the dinner around the kitchen table that is in the house that I grew up in, the same house that my dad grew up in and was built by my grandparents. It was important to me have the dinner around the kitchen table in my family home because that house has played a large part in my growing up, life lessons and me becoming a citizen. It just seemed appropriate to do the Kentucky Kitchen Table here because the conversation was mostly about citizenship and hearing people’s view points was another life lesson for me.
The people who were at my dinner were mostly my family members, and my brother and sister each brought someone with them. The person sitting at the head of the table was my dad, Bryan. My dad is an extremely hard worker who has always tried his best to make sure that my family has everything that we need. He always takes it upon his self to take full responsibility for everyone in the family. He is what some might describe an “old school” type of guy and his favorite phrase to tell my siblings and I is “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” which are his words to live by. People who know my dad and I often say that we are just alike, between our stubbornness and the way we always have a comeback for anything that is said to us, we are pretty similar. Another important personality trait about my dad is that, though he claims to be anti-social, he has a very strong since of community, is very involved with everybody around where we live, and is always willing to help out neighbors and friends. The next person at my dinner was my mom, Christina. My mom is someone that has always been there for me one hundred percent. Though she’s not perfect and makes mistakes, she is someone who has a huge heart and big love for helping people. She loves being involved in the community and is the type of person who is willing to step and lead people when she needs to. Throughout the years of being a softball mom for me and a cheerleader mom for my sister, she has given up countless hours to fundraising, driving us to practices and standing on the sidelines for my siblings and I. She’s very family orientated and is a major reason that I am so close to everyone in my family. Also, at my Kentucky Kitchen Table was my older sister, Mary Jo. She is the most care-free, bright, hyper and crazy person that I know, and I mean that in the best possible ways. She is the person that I consider my best friend and is someone that is always there for me. Ever since we were little, she’s the person that was always around to keep me playing, and active and trying new, wild things. She loves being around people and trying to get everyone around her to smile and have a good time. The last of my family, but definitely not the least, at my dinner is my older brother, Tyler. My brother is seven years older than me, so he has some perceptive on life that is different than mine and basically grew up in a different generation than me. Tyler is what some people might describe as a guy’s guy. He can make friends with almost anybody and anytime we go to any type of social outing together, nearly everybody in the room knows my brother and is excited to see him show up. People often refer to my sister and I as “Ed’s little sisters,” Ed being his nickname and what everybody in Taylor County calls him, other than the family. My brother is the type of person that other people just enjoy having around, probably because of his fun-loving and friendly nature. Another person at my Kentucky Kitchen Table was my sister’s boyfriend, Patrick. Patrick brings some diversity into the group at my dinner because he grew up outside of my family and our values. Pat is a fun, loud and adventurous guy who loves hanging out with his friends. I think one of the things that makes Patrick so diverse from my family and I is that my family is extremely family orientated and have family dinners all the time, while Pat is less family and religiously oriented than my family, but he still has no trouble fitting in to the family. The person at my Kentucky Kitchen table that I personally do not know very well, was my brother’s girlfriend Kim. My brother and Kim just recently started dating so my family and I have not really gotten a chance to now her very well yet, but this dinner did help us all get to know her better. Kim is a very sweet and intelligent person with big goals in life and she is always very kind and polite to everyone.
When I asked the required question about citizenship, everyone around the table talked a lot about how the most important thing about to them about being citizens in the United States was that they cherished their freedom. It was important to everyone at my dinner that their freedom be not be forgotten by those who are in power in are country and that we as citizens should appreciate the freedoms that we have. We discussed how people have different roles in our community and how it is people’s jobs to help support the people in the community in any way possible. The people at my dinner all seemed to have a strong sense of community and love to be involved with the people that surround them. Most of the people at my dinner knew their neighbors and were friendly with them. My parents talked about the times when they were younger, and how people in the community would get together and have dinners and street parties very regularly. Nearly everybody around would come to things like this, and everybody in the community would be friends. This is very different from today, because the newer generations, like my brother and sister, do not know their most, or hardly any of their neighbors and we today do not get to experience the way that neighbors and community members gather together and get to know everyone, like in past generations. Everyone around the table agreed that it is important to treat the people in our communities well and that getting involved in our communities is important for many reasons, like having friends and people you can rely on, and be relied on by, the people around you. A strong friendly community were everyone is connected and willing to help others is something that the world needs more. Some of the best things we can do to help our community is to just simply be involved and treat the people in it with respect. Another we discussed at my Kentucky Kitchen Table was how it seems the newer generations do not have the same respect for people in our communities that the older generations have. Things like being able to take time out of our day to visit our neighbors and being able to have face to face conversations, and scheduling neighborhood gatherings for everyone to come and simply enjoy each other’s company our things that we seem to have lost value in as the generations have gone by.
I think that the most important thing that I learned over the course of this meal is that to have a strong sense of citizenship it is important for us to be involved in our community. The things that were talked about at my Kentucky Kitchen Table relate to the central idea in this class about how we can live well together. We talked about how it is important to treat our neighbors with respect and being able to have fun community gatherings with our neighbors is important to living well together. The way we discussed about community at my dinner reminds me of the people talked about the way everyone got along in Love Thy Neighbor, before the war. Everyone got along and participated in the community before the war broke out. I just hope that the people from where I’m from have a strong enough sense of community that we could never turn on each other the way the people did in Love Thy Neighbor. I am grateful that I got to do this assignment in my home, around my kitchen table, in my community with people that I trust and respect. The things we talked about at the dinner, things like community and community roles and patriotism have helped to better understand how important it is to always be an active member of the community and to always try to be an involved citizen. I think that my favorite part about the Kentucky Kitchen Table, is that I got to learn what it means to be a citizen and community member by the people whose opinions I respect the most.