Goines On: Table manners

Click image for more vignettes

At lunch, after Goines had finished cutting up all of the raviolis in his bowl in preparation to begin eating, Mrs. Goines told him that when they dined with their children next month, he was not to do that.
    “Do what, exactly?”
    “Cut up everything before you start. Do just one at a time.”
    “It would embarrass you for me to do that?”
    “Yes.”
    Goines considered this for a moment, and in a spirit of conciliation he agreed. “What else should I refrain from doing? Maybe you should coach me before we make that trip. I could take notes.”
    “There are only two things,” Mrs. Goines said. “That and poking at the food with your bread.”
    Goines was holding a piece of bread when she said this, and he realized that he would probably, normally, continue to just hold the bread in his left hand as he forked with his right. Maybe he should lay the bread down between bites?
    “What do you mean, exactly,” he said, “by ‘poking’ at my food? No sopping up the liquid?”
    “No, sopping is fine. I meant poking.”
    Goines wasn’t aware that he “poked” at his food. He knew that he did use the bread in his left hand to help a piece of food onto his fork; was that it?
    “Yes, that’s what you shouldn’t do. Didn’t any debutantes you met in college instruct you what to do and not do before you accompanied them to their balls?”
    Goines wasn’t sure he had ever escorted a debutante to a ball, although he did escort that one girl to a dance at her college, but the only thing he remembered about the evening was the girl’s delight in introducing him to the dean of students: “Dr. Goines, I’d like to introduce you to Goines.”
    Goines remembered that college girl fondly. He had liked her, and he was pretty sure he had taken dinner with her and her parents in their home, but he couldn’t remember how that had come about. It did indicate that he might have dated her for a while, but where they had met and what college she had attended weren’t coming back to him. It was sad.
    Mrs. Goines was saying something. “...do what the host does.”
    “It’s okay to do something if our host does it?”
    “Right, that’s sort of a basic rule of etiquette.”
    Goines tried to put this in the context of having meals with their children, maybe not with both of them together every time.
    Goines brightened with a thought: “Maybe we could assign the host role for each meal, so that different behaviors would be allowed, depending?”
    Mrs. Goines chuckled.

Copyright © 2021 by Moristotle