i will never bring anyone home for dinner

Family dinners at my house are quite the event. For starters, we have to cram eight people around a dining room table that was really only built for six. Elbow room and passing the salad dressing are constant points of contention.

What makes dining chez Black a real treat, though, are the table manners of the men of the household. My father chomps his food like a horse. The loud, clacking together of teeth is the soundtrack to every meal. He chews mashed potatoes, for crying out loud. I kid you not. Whenever he picks up an apple to snack on, I literally have to excuse myself from the room.

My brother inhales food like he's been starved since birth. It sounds much like what I assume a slavering wolf feeding on a baby lamb would sound like. Also, he doesn't drink his water throughout his meal. No, he saves it all until the end, when he downs it in three disgustingly loud gulps. You can actually hear the crunchy sounds of the muscles in his throat expanding to accomodate all that liquid going down at once. And HEAVEN FORBID he help clear the table. I don't think he even knows where anything goes. The ketchup would end up lost in the freezer somewhere, the dirty dishes in the vegetable drawer, and the salt and pepper in the dishwasher.

Lastly, there's my grandfather. It's really more about what he doesn't do at the dinner table: engage in conversation or approve of others that do; pass anything to anyone; make any effort to be pleasant at all. And he eats some of the most disgusting concoctions I've ever seen, like boiled, mashed-up cauliflower and this weird yellow fish soup my grandma makes him. He puts sweet pickles and chunks of bread in it. I would actually rather take a bullet than find out what that shit tastes like. On the rare occasion that the rest of the family is eating something that he likes, I think he feels entitled to all of said food. If I take an extra piece of garlic bread (or three, because I FUCKING LOVE garlic bread), he glares at me with his hawk eyes and shakes his head, like I might as well be taking the goddamn food off of his own plate.



The garlic bread almost isn't worth it when I'm looking at this from the other end of the table.