Supper on the roof

Dec. 2, 1996
“Mom, someone in school asked me today if we really ate supper on the roof.” My child was outraged at the question.
For years, that rumor has spread. My daughter and sons have been quizzed every year by the new kids who hear the rumor.
When I taught in another school, transfer students told my students, who also asked if it were true.
It is time to put the question to rest. Yes, we did – but only years after the question began to be asked.
The rumor began several years ago when my teenaged sons were coming home for lunch every day, often inviting their friends. That spring day, I made up sandwiches and juice to feed them and a couple friends. However, the lunch crew that stormed through our door was twice the normal size. Counting the hands grabbing sandwiches from the plate, I grabbed mayo and bread to make more.
Waving a fistful of sandwich, one guy said, “Let’s eat outside.” They disappeared out the back door to the picnic table on the patio as quickly as they had barge in the front. It was a perfect worm, sunny spring day for a picnic.
Inside, I hurriedly slapped together more sandwiches, stirred up another pitcher of juice and carried it all outside. No one was there.
I could hear them, but the picnic table was empty.
“Hand’em on up.” The voice was above me. Sons and friends were perched on the peak of the low-grade roof of our ranch-style home. An extension ladder still leaned against the house from where it had been used the previous afternoon to get a Frisbee from the roof. I stood on the picnic table and handed him the plate of food. His brother scrambled down the ladder for the pitcher.
As they ate, they waved at friends driving cars past our house on their way to and from lunch. From that day on the legend of the high-rise meal at the Hershberger’s house began and has grown.
Sure the Hershbergers – a couple of them – ate lunch, not supper, on the roof that day, but so did a number of their classmates. No one ever asks about them.
We had the name, so we played the game. As my daughter grew up, she included time on the roof in her list of ideas for entertaining friends. Last fall, I realized how casual I had become about rooftop experiences. A concerned friend said, “I don’t know if I should say anything, but last week when I was over in that area, your kid and a friend were sitting on the roof.”
Puzzled, I asked, “And this is a problem?”
I went home and cross-examined my child about who, when, where and how safe was the roof.
When my son’s fiancée visited us the week before her wedding she asked to do something different. The best man for the wedding arranged the ladder, my daughter laid out a picnic table cloth, I fixed a chicken supper and we initiated her into the grandeur of eating supper on the roof.
That’s the only time I have ever been on the roof. So yes, we ate supper on the roof – many, many years after everyone began asking if it was true.