It was a recent summer morning in a suburban kitchen. Classical music hummed pleasantly from a radio. Several extra children had slept over the night before, and the breakfast table was a cheerful riot of pastries on trays, crumb-covered plates, and half-empty glasses of orange juice.
Really, the scene could not have been more placid. There was no hint of the conflagration to come.
Two children were still eating quietly; the others had run off to play. A grown-up was drinking coffee and leafing through the papers.
It was at this point that one of the remaining children wiped her mouth with her T-shirt and reached for a croissant from a tray decoratively heaped with them. But did she serve herself, put it on her plate and dismantle it?
No she did not — not all of it. Rather, she leaned forward and snapped off its crisp little crest, effectively wrecking it for anyone else, and wolfishly popped the fragment in her mouth.
In doing so, she unwittingly lit a fuse. And that fuse burned so quickly that, when its volatile cargo blew up, even the bomb was a bit surprised.
“Do … not … EVER … do … that!” the bomb exploded, sending a small, stinging bit of shrapnel, in the form of a brisk slap, at the child’s hand.
“Do what?”
“Break off bits of food from a platter that’s for EVERYONE. Stick your fingers in and mangle things! The food isn’t yours until it’s on your plate! Also, your shirt is not a napkin! Agh! How many times do I have to tell you?”
“I don’t know.”
“A hundred times? A thousand times?”
“I’m sorry!”
“Is it so hard to exercise even the slightest restraint?”
“Um … no?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” said the bomb, fizzling out as quickly as it had exploded. “I know. It looked tempting. And it’s hard to remember these things. But you must. You must learn decent table manners. You just must.”
The bomb felt bad about the way it had gone off. It wished it had handled the situation with more diplomacy, even though, honestly, how many times do people have to be told the same thing?
“Every single night, apparently,” said a fellow explosive from the Palisades, when the bomb related the incident. “I have to tell them: Put your napkins on your laps. Every. Single. Night. And still they forget.”
“Sit up straight, elbows off the table, chew with your mouth closed, wait until everyone’s served,” a Spring Valley friend sang in a singsong voice, to indicate the dreariness of delivering the same message over and over without much evidence of it’s being received.
In one family I know, slumping children are poked into position with a fork. In another, the father keeps elbows off the table by banging the bread knife. Everywhere, parents remind, cajole, nag — and occasionally explode.
The bomb, by the way, eventually apologized for going off. The croissant mangler apologized for her bad manners, and promised to try harder. Perhaps that’s the most anyone can expect.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
