The Subject we do not Talk about at Dinner

There are subjects I do not talk about at dinner. You probably have them too.

Nobody has forbidden them. It is only that when they come up, the dinner changes. Somebody goes quiet. Somebody leaves the table. My sister-in-law, at Christmas last year, stood up and cleared plates that were not ready to be cleared.

So we have learned, without deciding to, to keep the dinner calm. Football is fine. The weather is fine. Who is doing what for Easter is fine. The specific safe things.

This is new, or at least newer than I am. My parents argued at dinner. My grandparents argued at dinner. The arguments could be sharp, and the subjects were anything. At the end they got on with the meal. The argument was part of the meal.

Somewhere between then and now, the arguments stopped being part of the meal. The arguments started ending the meal. So we stopped having them.

When my parents argued, they agreed on what had happened. They disagreed about what to do about it. You can argue about what to do.

Now, the arguments start before what to do. They start at what happened. Two people at the same table, looking at different pictures of the same thing on their phones, reading different accounts, each certain their account is the real one.

The pictures are not there by accident. Something is choosing which pictures each of us sees. Something watches what we look at and feeds us more of it, quietly, for reasons I do not fully understand. We will come to this. For now, only this: when two people at the same table cannot agree on what happened, it may be partly because they have not, in a real sense, been shown the same thing.

You cannot argue about what to do when you cannot agree anything happened. So the argument does not start. It sits, quietly, under the meal.

You feel it, though. You feel it in what is not said.