Beam me up Scotty, There’s No Sign of Intelligent Conversation Here
My family and I were sitting at a round table adorned with a white tablecloth, burgundy napkins, and a formal arrangement of cutlery. My oldest son was graduating from Miracle Mountain Ranch, and while we awaited the ceremony, we had a delicious catered dinner.
I had been looking forward to this meal all day, but not out of hunger. My anticipation wasn’t due to the elegant meal, though the service and viands were excellent. In my greatest imagination, I pictured us sitting around the table engaged in some intellectual conversation. That was what I had been looking forward to. After all, this was a college graduation, wasn’t it? I knew from conversing with some of the students and faculty that we were in the presence of some very intelligent people. Thus, it was with elation and glee, that I pictured a riveting conversation about literature around the dinner table.
It wasn’t long after we sat down I realized that all my thoughts of stimulating conversation would have to be amended.
Before the meal began, the children made many admiring comments about the table setting. It was classy, with the usual arrangement of several pieces of cutlery. My youngest pointed to a smaller sized fork laid on the table above the plate. “What is that for?”
“Salad,” was one child’s firm answer.
“No, dork, it’s a dessert fork.”
“Why would they put the dessert fork up there? That makes no sense.”
“It’s a shrimp fork!” another child guessed.
“No, no… a shrimp fork is much smaller. Get it? Shrimp… small … get it?”
A general groan sounds from our table which garners a few questioning glances from our neighbor diners.
There was quite a debate, which my husband shushed as quickly as possible. Not that anyone would have noticed. The din in the dining area was deafening.
We were served our drinks, and my husband and I clinked our goblets of lemonade together. “Here’s to one down,” I said.
“Only six to go,” he replied, smirking.
Hope was still alive for a literary conversation, but as dinner progressed, I realized I was definitely going to have to discard my expectations of palaver and settle for disjointed confabulation.
“This butter is good. It’s real butter!” one child exclaimed, shoving half a dinner roll into his mouth, crumbs decorating his lips, chin, tie, and the edge of the tablecloth. Somehow every crumb managed to miss his napkin, which was miraculously in his lap.
“What is this?” one of my older daughters asked, poising a dark, purple cube impaled by her fork (her dessert fork, by the way).
“It’s a beet,” I replied.
“Why is it in with the carrots?” she made a face.
I sighed. “Because it tastes good. Just eat it.”
Such was the conversation around our table. We covered everything from proper cutlery for each course of the meal, to “hey you two, knock it off” from their dad from time to time in response to behavioral aberrations, to “Daddy, I have to pee!” from my 8-year-old, who thought the entire dining room needed to be informed of the condition of his bladder. I have long since discovered that the frequency of bladder emptying is directly proportional to the level of boredom. We had just sat through a great deal of grown up speeches, so his proclamation of bathroom dependence didn’t surprise me one iota.
After the family was settled, and well into the meal, my imagination brought up the prospect of turning the everyday banter into a literary discussion. I wondered what the response would be if I suddenly interjected “Hey family, let’s go around the table and name your favorite contextual lens with at least two examples from the novel Frankenstein. Oh, and you have to use the 1818 version. Go!”
Yeah, that wouldn’t be met with more than a cricket response.
It’s not that my family isn’t intelligent. They really are bright. The problem is that out of 7 children, and 1 husband, none of them share my enthusiasm for analyzing British Literature. Go figure. In fact, I have found that very few people get excited about comparing and analyzing tragic heroes, hubris, and fractured fraternities in literature such as Beowulf, Othello, and Frankenstein.
Previously that day, I had a conversation with a friend of the family about Frankenstein. She made an innocent comment how in movies, whenever a sad moment happens, there is almost always rain. I interjected with the observation that the strategy of tying natural elements to human emotions and circumstances was a major technique in the Romantic Era of literature. I pointed out that Frankenstein was an excellent example of the technique.
The poor girl replied that she had never actually read Frankenstein, but would like to someday. I don’t know if she was being polite, or truly interested. It made no difference to me. I started gushing before I, or my husband, could put a cork in my mouth.
“Oh, you should! But make sure you start with the 1818 version, not the 1831 revision. I think Shelley changed an awful lot in that later version, which detrimentally affected the plot and characters. I don’t know what possessed her. I mean if it ‘ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ right? Maybe because she had changed so much as a person? Who knows. Anyway, don’t expect any lightning bolts, that is just Hollywood. It’s not in the original story. All for dramatic effect for the movies, you know.”
There I took a breath. The poor girl! While she followed my blathering perfectly, she was beginning to glaze over, and look beyond me to a place where she wasn’t trapped listening to an impromptu dissertation on the Romantic and Gothic qualities Mary Shelley presented in Frankenstein. The young lady appeared to be trapped, and overwhelmed, much like any reader of the preceding paragraph might be looking now.
The dinner finally ended, my son graduated, and we returned home where I eased my disappointment by randomly re-reading portions of Frankenstein, and debating with myself the different contextual lenses represented in the passage.
Way to live it up on a Saturday night, isn’t it?
