Dinner Conversations

When it comes to diversity and stories Chaucer’s pilgrims had nothing on my dinner table this past week.

I adore the crap shoot that is dinner seating during a cruise. I have been fortunate in the past, but seem to have hit a jackpot on this one. Maybe it’s as easy as the fun people dine later in the evening? I don’t have the answer, but I relish the results.

My table assignment is on the first curve of the second level of Britannia Restaurant. Excellent view of much of the dining room, so people watching would be more than possible. Over 5 evening meals, I have never gotten the chance to even peek at the neighboring tables; I have been consumed by my fellow 320ers.

Since we are 7 at a table for 6, there is no distance between us, so everyone hears and responds to everyone else’s comments or anecdotes. We talk over and around each other, with no one person commanding the table for long as the discussions ranged in all directions:

• Theater or film
• Disfiguring paintings
• Edmund Burke’s definition of government responsibility
• An impromptu rendition of  La Marseillaise which might soon be on YouTube
• Prizes won as opposed to accolades received
• Shipping antique cars across the world
• Multiple marriages
• How many houses we have called “home”
• Language samplings: Greek, Portuguese, Tagalog, French, Latin, Spanish, American and British
• Books on our beside tables
• To pasta or not to pasta?
• Heavy mining equipment
• If you buy someone else’s creation, is it yours to do with as you wish?
• 10-minute plays
• Challenges of French river barge life
• Best movie ever made as opposed to the one movie watched over and over and over again
• Victorian artifacts
• The weight of kilts
• Chilled soups vs. hot soups
• iPad or Kindle?
• Innovation
• Shipping crates and valises
• Living in the Azores
• Clive Palmer funding the creation of Titanic 2
• Media literacy
• Film versions of favorite novels
• Would Sophocles and Euripides agree that literacy is more than just reading and writing?
• Public school educations
• Life on an Indian reservation
• Train travel
• Airports
• Experiencing the Rhine in a canoe
• Fishing
• Vegetarian diets

The most diverting conversations revolved around us as characters in an evolving Agatha Christie piece. Lacking the “life is a village” perspicacity of Miss Marple and the “little grey cells” of Poirot, we are still questioning each other to solve the mystery of the nearly downed man. I have one more night with Table 320. Though I hope our crime caper is resolved, I really don’t care.

 These men and women have offered me mental and conversational stimulation and challenge. They have made dinner each evening worthy of a Noel Coward play.