Something to Talk About

Family mealtimes are the perfect setting to discuss the important issues of the day. Too bad this didn’t occur to Curt and me when our kids were young and impressionable. Some families discuss philosophy, great books, current events, religion, and other important topics over dinner. These parents are likely mature, intelligent, engaged, and driven, and if we’d had our stuff together in our twenties and thirties, maybe we, too, would have read editorials at the dinner table. It just never occurred to us to turn family meals into enrichment courses.

When our kids were young, we started the practice of each sharing our “Most Interesting Thing” that had happened to us that day. Oftentimes the most interesting thing was entirely mundane, since most days no one made the Olympic team or even won the spelling bee. The rule was, no matter how seemingly UNinteresting, everyone must share something. It didn’t matter that our contributions were usually along the lines of “I had to clean up dog vomit,” or “My sock has a big hole in the toe.” What mattered was that we were each contributing to the conversation.

 (Allow me a small, maudlin digression: When was the last time we did this? There had to have been the one last time when all the kids were around the table, which passed unremarkably without our knowing it was the last time. So many such last times. )

Imagine this guy at your door, six feet tall.

A while back, our grandson Will brought up a topic over breakfast at our house. “If the doorbell rang and when you went to the door there was a giant chicken with ten rows of jagged teeth, would you die of fright before you got eaten?”  Hmmm. That’s a great question we all may ponder over our eggs.  How frightened would you actually be? Could the chicken just be making a neighborly visit? Perhaps we shouldn’t judge it by its appearance. Or maybe the cat would scare it away before it had a chance to eat you.

Last night I was invited to share a light meal with our daughter Angie and her family. As we sat enjoying our spicy chili made with sweet potatoes, no beans, 11-year-old granddaughter Catie suggested we play “Big Words.”  The way it goes is, one person says a simple sentence, and then the next person has to repeat it using fancy vocabulary. Catie wanted to start.

Simple sentence:  “I like cats.” Fancy: “I considerably enjoy  the feline species.”
Simple: “I put pins and needles into a pincushion.” Fancy: “I inserted thin, sharp objects and other thin, sharp objects into a thin, sharp thing holder.” (OK, so sometimes it’s hard to come up with on the spur of the moment.)
Will, being a 13-year-old boy, gave me his sentence: “I blew farts into the toilet.” Fancy: “I emitted methane gas into the sanitary receptacle.”
 Simple: “I want to go to Chicago to eat pizza.” Fancy: “I desire travel to the Windy City to consume a pepperoni-topped disc.”
Dave to Angie: “Dang, my breath smells bad.” Fancy: “Zounds! My laryngeal exhalations are malodorous.”

The moral of the story:  if your dog vomited today or you experienced unfortunate intestinal upset, you really don’t need to bring up the health care crisis or climate change to have stimulating dinner topics. And perhaps an oversized species of poultry with irregular dentition will bypass your domicile rather than chiming your summoning apparatus.