Possible Dinnertimes, In Order of Moral Laxity

I’m unlocking this subscribers-only post from 2018 while I’m still in Australia for the Dear Prudence book tour. At one point I learned I had been invited to an author’s dinner at 9:30pm, and I realized how much work there still is to be done when it comes to raising awareness.

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I was raised by Protestants in the Midwest. My views on when dinnertime ought to be are are as fixed and immutable as the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

4:30pm.

Obviously this is not an option when dealing with others. I am not unreasonable; I am not suggesting you ring up a couple of pals and suggest they meet you at the local brasserie at 4:30 in the afternoon. But come, let us reason together! Let us say you began your day with breakfast. Let us assume again you had it at the hour of 8am. Fine, then, this places lunch around noon, or perhaps noon-thirty. Let us replicate that gap and what have we got? Dinner at half four. One cannot argue with mathematics. Perhaps we are exhausted, and the sun is already setting at five-thirty, and we find ourselves in bed by nine – it sounds outrageous, yes, but look back at the description of the day and tell me where the flaw in my reasoning lies? Nowhere, is where. Dinner at 4:30 is possible. I do not say it is preferable, nor even that it ought to be a daily occurrence. I merely posit that a reasonable person may find herself eating dinner at this hour perhaps once a week. If you are a lover of truth, you must admit it.

5:00pm.

Still a bit early to ask anyone to join you – an idiosyncratic dinnertime, to be sure, but a real and valid one nonetheless – perhaps a very dear and very old friend might. Most restaurants are open. “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” people are always saying on TV. Surely at least one of them was referring to supper.

5:15pm.

The dinner ideal. The sun is still shining, the evening still feels replete with possibility rather than an inevitable hauling back into one’s bed-cave – maybe you’ll go out after this, already sated and full of energy and free from having to participate in the “I don’t know, where do you want to get dinner?” game. Done by 5:45, sink free of dishes by 6:15.

5:20pm.

A perfectly sound alternative. No cavities, no broken bones, an unstitched and sunny childhood was yours. People reflexively smile when they see your face. A bean, a green, a grain, with a light salad to finish – possibly something out of the Moosewood cookbook. Everything casually yet artfully arranged on mismatched platters and oversized wooden bowls.

5:30pm.

You have children, perhaps? This is why dinner is slightly delayed, that they might wash the afternoon’s play from their hands, all while asking one another polite questions about natural history. You are a good mother, loved and respected by all; powerful vines and brambles grow in ordered patterns all around your house.

5:45pm.

You are, perhaps, an artist. A good artist. You look up at the clock, only to realize you were so lost in The Work that you let the dinnertime hour lapse by a whole half an hour. You unleash a low, throaty chuckle at your own bohemian carelessness and begin to heat a hearty peasant stew you made the day before.

6:00pm.

Stout-hearted yet stylish – you contain the best of all possible worlds. Reliable in a crisis, quick to speak truth, always tactful, and with an air.

6:15pm.

There comes a time when one must ask oneself: Am I committing the near-sin of fanciness? Have I strayed too far from my homesome roots? Would my poor, benighted, grandmotherly aunt recognize me in my Jazz-Age den of lacksadaisicality and my proximity to vice? Am I, in short, in danger of becoming suave? There is nothing quite wrong with 6:15, mind you, but there is such a thing as avoiding needless danger. Might you not cause other brothers and sisters to stumble?

6:30pm.

Well! Well, well, well, well, well. Who have we here? A big shot. A kingpin. A high flyer. A big man. Too good to call your mother. Too good to check your voicemail. Too good to turn your head at a party when someone recognizes you. Too good to tip the coat check. Top of the line, high on the hog, doesn’t bother to remember a name unless that name is going to do something for ya. That it? Fly a little closer to the sun, why don’tcha? Spread those wings and melt, baby.

7:00pm.

This is an act of enmity against me. I cannot possibly interpret an invitation to dinner at 7:00 in good faith. You want me to get hungry at the customary hour, then wait another two hours before we sit down to eat? I take it as the advent of formal hostilities, and will respond in kind.

8:00pm.

I thought the line “She gets too hungry for dinner at eight” from “The Lady Is A Tramp” was a joke until I was probably 22 years old. The lyrics in that song were always a little confusing to me, and I figured “dinner at eight” was just part of the gag, like a paradox, or like “I’m my own grandpa.” It would have been like saying “She gets too hungry for dinner at four in the morning, having last eaten something at lunch,” or “She gets too hungry after a week without food.” The idea that human beings ate dinner at 8:00 at night, post-meridian, would have been as laughably unbelievable as the claim that some people could absorb nutrients through osmosis, by holding loaves of bread in their hands and squeezing very tightly.

8:30pm.

One time – I think it was in high school Spanish class – I remember reading a paragraph about this somewhere – I remember reading a claim someone made that in Spain, families sit down for dinner at 10:00pm. I did not believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. I won’t publish it.

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