When the dinner bell rang at our house, it rang for hours. 

The nightly clock would run while my very big Franco-American family huddled around the altar that was our dinner table. The wine, cheese, baguette, salad, conversation, everything melted in our mouths. It was like the movies, and those times not only fed me for years but set up my most prevailing ideas about slowness and closeness that I have to this day.