My parents were strict but lighthearted people. They could see humor in life’s situations. At the same time they expected good behavior. There was an overarching belief back in those days that if parents weren’t watching, God most certainly was.

Enter the quarter jar. The quarter jar was well, a little like God Watching. The purpose was to collect quarters from us if we exhibited bad manners at the dinner table. Bad behavior included anything from showing up late, to having your elbows on the table to kicking someone under the table, to saying a bad word. We could be silly at times, but if it got out of hand, paying a quarter brought us back into line. An infraction might be something like laughing too much while drinking milk, or singing a little too loud, “On Top of Spaghetti” the night Mom was serving meatballs.

After a few rounds of the “quarter jar good behavior program”, our parents must have decided we were well behaved enough to accompany them on vacation during one of our father’s business trips. My siblings were fourteen and twelve, and I was nine the summer they took us across the pond to visit England and Scotland.

Back then everyone dressed up to fly. My mother wore a nice travel suit. My sister and I had matching dresses with sweaters. We all had new London fog type raincoats. It was early June but rain was likely. We had maps and a plan, which included the English countryside for a week, followed by Scotland for a week, then back to London for a week while our father attended his conference.

We arrived at Heathrow following a plane delay the night before. Our new outfits were wrinkled and our mother had sat on a piece of cheese which one of us, probably me, had inadvertently left on her plane seat. Next was our Dad practicing the lefthanded stick shift car while driving on the opposite side and navigating a roundabout. He was clearly out of his comfort zone and traveling with the family in tow added to the stress. Our mother observed a few days into the trip that things seemed to run smoothly every day until about 5 pm, then there was what she called forever more, “the hour of charm”.

This trip was a very memorable family vacation. We learned a lot about the different Kings and Queens, the history between England and Scotland, and the influence of the Romans on Britain through the centuries. We saw every site imaginable in both countries. We saw castles and cathedrals surrounded by bucolic countryside. The trip was richly rewarding, and then, there was Hadrian’s Wall.

It happened one day, around 5pm, the hour of charm. We were somewhere in the middle of Britain and we all distinctly heard our father swear for the first and only time, ever. “Damn!” he exclaimed from the driver’s seat. Then, hitting the brakes, “Wall! Where is that damned wall? “. Hadrian and the ancient Romans had built a wall between England and Scotland, but centuries of erosion and a lot of sheep poop later, there were places where it was easy to view and some where access was problematic. Our Dad had apparently chosen the wrong access point. We all looked at each other, mildly alarmed. “Dad swore”, we said, surprised and secretly happy that this might mean the good behavior bar was getting lower. “He owes us a quarter!”, we all chimed in. When we finally arrived and stood on the wall it was well past 5pm and it meant more to us than perhaps it did to Hadrian himself.

A few days following our Dad’s isolated swearing incident, the three of us started giggling pretty badly at a restaurant. Up until that point, we had been on our best behavior. Here we were at this small restaurant, a well-mannered American family far from home, surrounded by centuries of history, eating some very slippery Brussels sprouts. Just then a sprout rolled off the table, heading towards the table next to us. The Brussels sprout landed right below the feet of a man at the next table. He happened to be in the middle of blowing his nose into a large handkerchief. It looked from our vantage point as if the little runaway vegetable had sprouted and fallen from the gentleman’s nose. We could not contain our laughter. Our mother’s stare back at us had several quarter jars, not to mention Roman centuries worth of “behave yourselves” written in it. She was clearly embarrassed. We did not think to check the time but let’s just assume it was somewhere around 5pm. Most of all, the similarity of the errant sprout to the meatball from “On Top of Spaghetti” was undeniable.

I don’t know if our parents enjoyed the trip as much as we did, but it was an incredible experience to have at a young age and it brought us years of “remember when” stories. Our behavior improved following reprimands about the Brussel sprouts incident and I never did like to eat them. Our parent’s sacrifices and strictness paid off and we all grew up to be people who appreciated travel, museums, castles, and history. Most importantly we learned that parents are human too, and its important to find the humor in everyday foibles.

Years later I was sitting in a rambunctious meeting at work. People were trying to solve a tough problem, their voices elevated. Our boss was patiently trying to take the high road, to reign everyone in a bit, and said we all needed a jar to put a quarter in each time we swore or exhibited bad meeting behavior. Interestingly enough, everyone in the room who was my about my age knew exactly what he was talking about. All of our parents had tried the quarter jar or something like it as a means of instilling good behavior. For the most part it had worked, but we were all sheepish examples of its failure. Sometimes you have to pay the price of being human and throw a quarter in the jar. (lwr 10/20/2017)