Need an excuse to spend a little more time with your family? How
about the dinner table? It’s almost as if there’s never a reason good enough to not
attend the daily dinner meeting. As if when someone attempts to escape the routine,
a slight sense of betrayal captures the face of your parents. Everyone feels like the
dinner table is simply a time to “check in” with the family, and your parents are
those annoying professors who insist on taking roll call every day. There is no doubt
that you actually get to enjoy a nice meal, but there’s a number of significant events
that turn this seemingly “enjoyable meal” into a small talk carnival that ultimately
ends in each member leaving the table disappointed. Although the end of dinnertime
seems to be a completely un-enjoyable, the beginning isn’t usually that bad. Your
mom frantically attempts to add last minute modifications to the food that has been
prepared for well over an hour while you are entrusted with the task of
simply “rounding everyone up.” A seemingly easy task compared to actually cooking
the food, but watch out, this could be treacherous. So your hunt begins for sibling
number one, who is for some reason nowhere to be found. Eventually, you’ll learn
that he is conveniently “taking a shower,” which renders him unreachable. Even
worse, you understand that you’ll have to make a second trip to this location in
order to successfully deliver the message that dinner is ready. You shrug it off, and
proceed to look for sibling number 2. To your disappointment, sibling number 2 has
decided to take a nap. Unfortunately, this is no ordinary nap and you are faced with
either taking 20 minutes to wake them up nicely or forcefully waking them with the
risk of them hating you for the remainder of the day. Lastly, it’s time to find sibling
number 3. You conveniently find sibling number 3 in a random room while walking
down the hallway. It’s almost to good to be true, he’s not sleeping, and he’s in plain
slight, almost ready for you to deliver the message. You deliver the message
smoothly and he responds with, “I’ll be right there.” This answer is only a decoy that
buys him time, you will definitely have to make second trip to tell him yet again that
dinner ready. You return to the kitchen frustrated, exhausted and having practically
done nothing in terms of gathering the family for dinnertime. It’s now finally time to
eat and you are starving. Everything looks delicious, except for the smaller reheated
misshapen plates that contain yesterday’s leftovers. You proceed to serve yourself
while others continue to mumble things like, “Could you pass the rice?” or “Wow this
tastes pretty good.” All is well until someone who is unable to handle the simple
silence of the meal, blurts out a random comment that has practically no bearing
what so ever. What sucks is that this small attempt to break the awkward silence has
summoned a tornado of small talk throughout the table, and everyone is involved.
It’s always that last few minutes of the dinner scene that are the most brutal, the
emotionless slow chew of your food; the wandering eyes, and the unbreakable
awkward silence. That previously delightful piece of chicken and spoon of rice that
so lavishly occupied your plate has now turned to an unappetizing mixture of scraps.
You yourself are even disgusted at how sloppy your specific plate looks when you
leave the table to go wash it. You leave the kitchen thinking that the silence was only
because today happened to be uneventful and that tomorrow will be different. You
are wrong.
