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Two years ago, our friends the Smiths admitted that they ate dinner in front of the TV. I was shocked. My husband and I always sat at the dining room table, providing us with an opportunity to talk, even on those evenings when we didn't take advantage of it.
But did you ever notice that discovering how someone else lives gives you tacit permission to do the same? Thus, over the space of several months, we began to take a tray upstairs to the small den and to eat, plates on knees, while watching the screen. This happened with no acknowledgment. We never discussed the fact that what seemed to be our principled decision to eat in the dining room was so casually subverted.
I need to say that we don't watch "TV." We watch a 1930s movie (last night it was Mae West and Cary Grant) or a BBC costume drama. We've seen all of Jane Austen's novels as filmed by the BBC in the 1970s, as well as "Middlemarch", which I have more than once tried and failed to read in its original novel form. So we eat to the beat of high culture, not the networks' latest sitcom.
Recently, just as we had begun to eat our spaghetti (awkward as the dickens to eat from your lap), my brother Jerry called from
Jerry loves to cook and he told me that recently he had bought a pork shoulder roast for a family dinner. As he removed the plastic wrapper from the supermarket meat package, he noticed the sticker saying, "
It used to be that the near-by town of Flora, Delphi's rival for county seat, called itself, "Hog Capital of the World"—and proclaimed that honor on the revolving bank sign at the town's one stoplight. Now, apparently,
Today New Hampshire, tomorrow the world! Go,
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