The other day I was eating lunch at Smorgasburg (an outdoor food market with something like 100 vendors) in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Picnic tables were at a premium but luckily I was able to find a couple of empty seats.
As it turned out I was sharing the table with a family of six. A family that was really into being a family. They took turns sending a pair or two of family members to acquire food from vendors. Those pairs would return with one or two food items that the family would eat as a team and then they would send a new pair of people off to get more food. This picnic table was not going to leave their possession any time soon.
At one point, just the father and his son were at the table sitting next to us. They each had a stack of baseball cards and were going through them and looking each one up on their phones to see how much they were worth. They would say things like, “This one is worth 60¢ in good condition.” This was at lunch, outside. They ate mozzarella sticks and went back to appraising baseball cards. I don’t think they really cared about the value, it was the act of looking up the numbers. I don’t know. They seemed to be into it.
“You know what I like about our family,” the dad asked, “We don’t go to chain restaurants. This place is so small, it’s the opposite of a chain.” It was like he was trying to convince himself they were doing the right thing.
The rest of the family had now returned with more food.
“You know what I like about our family,” the son eerily echoed his dad’s statement, “We share food. Some people get their own thing [meal] and I just get full. I like to try everything.”
Now, at this point, I wanted everyone to have their “You know what I like about our family?” moment. That, of course, would have made my head explode. Just for fun though, I thought of a few more ways they could like their family’s eating habits:
- “You know what I like about our family? We all say ‘yes, please’ whenever a waiter asks if we want fresh pepper.”
- “You know what I like about our family? We always stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance before eating.”
- “You know what I like about our family? We talk about dessert but never order any.”
- “You know what I like about our family? We eat our food through our mouths, how humans who are definitely not aliens would eat.”
