Do I dare?

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

There were dinners where my mother would put her face in her hands, not sure whether to laugh or cry at my sibs' antics. My brothers eventually dubbed this reaction the "laugh-cry" and felt they had scored points if they drove my mother to this state of exasperation before a meal's end.

Crash and the Boy sit diagonally across from each other at the dinner table, a configuration deliberately chosen to put as much space between them as possible in the (usually vain) hope that this will limit the ways in which they can irritate each other to the merely verbal. And , despite have banned any material which incorporates one or more of the seven motifs of disgust as topics, the verbal alone is often enough to drive me to "laugh-cry."

The guys have grown lanky over the last year. There never seems to be quite enough room under the table for their long legs and suddenly enormous feet, and the sub rosa jockeying for space not infrequently erupts into overt sparring. The other night, the Boy reached his limit and grabbing a fork full of his dinner, held it up in firing position ("food fight" and Revenge of the Nerds flashed through my brain). Then he quoted the tidbit above from T.S. Eliot, and treated us to a soliloquy on decision making.

He finished by turning to me and inquiring if I appreciated the irony. "Of someone mature enough to quote Eliot and immature enough to throw food?" I shot back. "Believe me, I do."

Disclaimer: No food was actually thrown in the incident recounted here (or in the writing of this post).