Dinner with the Smileys : One Military Family, One Year of Heroes, and Lessons for a Lifetime

Fifty-two guests take turns filling a military father's chair at his family's dinner table while he serves his yearlong deployment. The week before Thanksgiving 2011, Dustin Smiley left for a yearlong military deployment. Soon after, his son Ford, eleven, invited Senator Susan Collins to fill his dad's chair at dinner. On January 3, 2012, Senator Collins came to dinner ... and brought brownies. So began Dinner with the Smileys , nationally syndicated columnist Sarah Smiley's fifty-two-week commitment to fill her husband's place at the family dinner table with interesting people—from schoolteachers to Olympians, professional athletes to famous authors, comedians to politicians—and unique role models for her three sons, even as she knows Dustin's seat cannot truly be "filled" until he is home again for the fifty-third dinner. Why dinner? Because dinnertime is often the loneliest time for people living alone. If houses and apartments were like dollhouses with one side totally exposed, Sarah says, we'd see plenty of people eating alone to the glow of a television. That was the fate Sarah feared for herself and her children during Dustin's absence. So she opened her home, and she and the kids sent invitations. And they found that a surprising number of people really are available for dinner. You just have to ask. In a time when popular culture leads us to believe that the family dinner table is dead, Dinner with the Smileys shows people that time spent with family, friends, and neighbors is still very much part of the American lifestyle. This is the heartfelt true story of a wife and mother's yearlong experience inviting one new guest (from senators to school teachers, artists to professional athletes) to dinner each week that her husband was deployed overseas. But the story isn't really about dinner. Or the military. It's a love story about marriage, motherhood, and the community that helped her raise three boys (one on the cusp of adolescence) in the absence of their father.-- Documents Sarah Smiley's efforts to fill her husband's place at the dinner table with interesting people who could be role models for their three sons while their father, pilot Dustin Smiley, was on a yearlong deployment with the Navy