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Table Manners

How to set the table.

 Brace yourself. We're not great at this one.

Here's what I'll say to you, Joshua. Let's imagine you've been home with your husband for one full month: You're both on paternity leave. Let's say you're both a bit anxious. This means your conversations might begin to resemble the following:

DADDY: Do you think it's safe to take a family trip to the beach?
PAPA: Do you think the night nurse will murder our baby?

In this context, you're maybe going to need an intermission from conversation. So dinner maybe doesn't need to be a Victorian affair, with salad forks and swan-shape napkin-folding.

No. Dinner needs to be a hasty moment of carnage, and it needs to occur with the Paul Giamatti soap opera BILLIONS playing in the background. You're sitting on a couch with a paper plate, and maybe--MAYBE--one item of silverware is involved. Or maybe you're using your fingers.

Your spouse believes that the dog can be trained, or re-trained, so he will sit low to the ground and attempt to reason with the dog: "Salvy, don't try to eat this. You wouldn't like this...." Salvy will pursue his own agenda.

You yourself are slightly more pragmatic--or maybe slightly lazier--and so you'll just perch on an armrest and hold the paper plate crazily above your head throughout the Paul Giamatti show. When you (inevitably) send a glass of water free-falling toward the floor, then you should swear loudly, with surprise, because of course you couldn't have seen this coming.

And that's how you set the table?

I guess?

Hope this helps!
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