Dinner as Usual

Across the same circular dinner table in the same offensively fluorescent lit Chinese restaurant, which had somehow become ritualized after seven years, is my dad engaged in a spirited conversational lecture about how the housing market in Seattle is doing.  Everyone else is either idly waiting for the food to arrive or entertaining the person next to them with vapid, but warm, exchanges. I am claustrophobically positioned next to a distractingly mirrored wall and in front of an equally distracting little girl in pig tails and an over sized plastic pearl necklace; she is less than a decibel away from screaming in my ear, and judging by the way she is unabashedly yanking at my hair, has likely never been told to keep her hands to herself.  Hoping that seven year olds pick up on nuanced social cues for discomfort, I turn around and flash a blatantly disingenuous smile at her.  Unfortunately, to her, it translated as a request for her to pull on my hair a little harder and giddily squeal in my ear a lot louder.  At this point, between the lack of space to exist without having to stand in as a sadistic child's doll and the waiter who has been frantically ignoring our table, I hate this place and am ready to leave. 

Fifty-seven minutes later-I counted- the food arrives with our unapologetic waiter and the girl behind me, at long last, gets bored and redirects her attention to her father leaving me to refocus my attention on the task at hand.  Everyone's appetite is apparent because no one hesitatingly waits for anyone else to serve themselves first this time. As everyone is moving onto their next dish, my dad moves onto his next topic of discussion, directed towards me this time, and not out of consolation because he notices how irked and quiet I've been, but because he genuinely wants to talk about it.“So, what did you think of the debates the other night?”  He leans forward and his eyes widen when I reply, “Actually, I think McCain handled the questions rather well.”  He is gleefully astonished as if I had just told him that I wanted to give up liberal arts and work towards winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  As he begins to rave about the virtues of a potential president that I had nightmares about, I notice the lines around his mouth and eyes have a great deal of character all on their own; they seem to smile for him and express his thoughts with more clarity than he ever could with his awkward foreign syntax that sometimes took a while to reorganize into coherence.  Behind his bifocals, his eyes are full of the wonderment of a five year old.  He gesticulates with certainty and speaks at the pace, depth, and length of a latchkey kid waiting at the door for his parents after his first eventful day of elementary school.  My mom deliberately starts a chain reaction of yawns around the table and my dad obviously takes this signal of unanimous disinterest in his political spiel to heart. He abruptly wraps up and it is only when he finishes his twenty minute passionately rambling endorsement that the 58 exhaustive years become visible on his face and in his voice; his last word falls limp out of his mouth and the animation heartbreakingly drains from his face for the first time since we all sat down.  I look around the table with disgust akin to the reaction one would give an overbearingly aggressive hockey father belittling his child after a lost game.  Then I ask, "So, what do you think he would do about Iran, if he was elected?"