Every so often, grandchildren at the table, I quote this rhyme from I don’t know where—
I also, on occasion, lecture on the importance of rehearsing proper table manners. I point out how awful it would be to get invited to the palace to eat with the queen and then feel awkward and miserable at the table because they’d never learned how to conduct themselves in society.
I tell the children how once, in a land far away, the county schools superintendent—whom we barely knew—had Paulson and me to dinner.
(Our kids stayed home, uninvited.)
Her husband served beef stroganoff with glistening, wide noodles. Slippery slippery. Sitting in the elegant dining room, trying to keep a composed look on my face, I kept steering them around the plate with my fork, sometimes snagging something. I suppose I spoke—in the requisite even-keeled manner, not emotively, not opinionatedly—if the topic allowed, but mostly I could only keep myself together.
The problem? No practice. At home we were never formal. That night when we got back the place looked spic-and-span fine, but the kids—they’d made a cake—revealed they’d been throwing icing around. What well-trained children do that? And nobody has straightened up. Still homebodies to the core, Paulson and I rarely get to mingle with the cultured and erudite—and when our house fills with family, beware. Everybody clamors. Conversations crisscross, rudely. We scrape our chairs up to the table, elbow to elbow, and shovel food from the bowls going around, or we weave over to the stuffed furniture with our plates we filled straight from the pots. We go for seconds. Unless the pea poem comes up, genteel isn’t in the vocabulary.
I think it was real stroganoff that husband served, actual chunks of sirloin or what have you, not the hamburger kind I make—so it might be that people who eat hamburger stroganoff just don’t know better in general.
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