The End of the Meal

[my response to the Sunday Scribblings prompt, "the end"]

When I was growing up, the evening meal was served all at once. If there was salad, it was passed at the same time as the main dish and the sides. And usually things were passed. We didn't think of most our dinners as formal, though we did often have a tablecloth on the table, and we all sat down together. But whatever pot or pan we cooked in was what we served out of. A few hotpads or trivets kept the table from being scorched.

Once everyone finished eating, we usually cleared the pots and dishes from the table, putting the dishes into the dishwasher or stacking them to be washed by hand, putting leftovers in the refrigerator, putting the trivets away.

And then sometimes we had dessert. Sometimes it was fruit, now and then it was something sweeter: ice cream and cookies, or cake, or apple crisp, or a special pastry. We were often told "keep your forks" when we cleared the table, so that we didn't have more to wash after the meal. But by the time I was a young teen, I knew that dessert wasn't necessarily the end of dinner.

From the time we were little, my parents taught us good table manners. We were taught to be polite, to use utensils to eat with, to wipe our mouths with our napkins, and to sit at the table, even when we had finished unless we were asked to be excused. The figured if we behaved at home, we would also behave in the world, and she never had to be embarrassed by our behavior when we ate out in a restaurant or when we were guests in someone else's home.

My parents did not, however, hold to the "seen and not heard" philosophy of child-rearing. We were encouraged to take part in conversations. We were asked about our day and urged to ask questions. There was a certain amount of teasing. It was said of our dinner table that "the first liar didn't have a chance" meaning that one person started an exaggeration and then another person would build on that and so on. I remember a lot of laughter at the dinner table, and some bemused looks from visitors who hadn't experienced this kind of jesting before.

So with congenial conversation and joking, we talked and talked. And reaching the end of the food did not always happen at the end of a conversation. It was common for us to continue talking even after the last cake crumbs had disappeared from the plates. Sometimes a map would be brought out to help explain something, or maybe a dictionary or encyclopedia, or a photo album, or one of the many kinds of bibles in the house (we had more than one religion in the family).

My wife and I don't typically eat at the dinner table these days, but we certainly do when we have guests over. And those meals are likely to have the same endings as the ones I grew up with - with good conversation. I think of our closest friends and in each case, I remember conversations, many of which took place after dessert, often still sitting around one table or another, at our place or theirs.