Whatever you may have heard about the vanishing American ritual of families eating dinner together, never fear, the practice is safe at my house. Sort of.

We're there every night. Early or late, and more often late, we sit down on our creaking, half-broken chairs, pass plates around the table with the knife gouged in it — blame the tequila — and the dinner show unfolds.

There's sibling rivalry, of course, as The Little Darlings try to one-up each other.

There are dress-code violations: Underwear is not acceptable dinner attire.

And there are semi-polite reviews about the food. "Mom, is this really a Top 5 meal?"

Few topics are off-limits. Miss Manners would never approve. Mrs. G. sure doesn't.

Dinner at my house has become so entertaining that friends of Firstborn regularly join us. One of them is so comfortable at our house that she just walks right through the kitchen door, checks out the refrigerator and passes judgment on the leftovers. She brings her boyfriends, too.

Another of Firstborn's friends is convinced our life should be a sit-com.

This wasn't the case at my house when I was growing up. We all ate together, but dinners were more sedate.

Sure, my siblings and I argued about everything. And we complained a lot about the over-boiled vegetables, until we discovered that the family dogs would eat them.

But none of my friends wanted to join us. We were too boring.

My mother specialized in desserts, not gourmet meals. We ate a lot of casseroles cooked with ingredients that we could never truly identify.

This doesn't happen at my table. We have a ranking system that offers fair warning.

We created it one evening while eating Mrs. G.'s linguine with clam sauce. I said it had to be the No. 1 meal, or surely Top 5. Shameless suck-up, aren't I?

Anyway, The Little Darlings agreed with that, but the rest of the list prompted argument, naturally.

The Bottom 5 stirred similar debate except for last place. It was unanimous: Pancakes. Mrs. G.'s pancakes are so tough, they could pass for Frisbees. Really. Her father even warned me before I married her. He said it was genetic.

But I digress. That's a breakfast food anyway.

I don't know what other fathers experience when they sit down to dinner — or even what they expect to hear at the table, if anything. Or if they care. At my house, dinner is a social hour that offers gravy for the soul.

We're not concerned with the soup bone as much as the funny bone.

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.