Eating Dinner Alone

I have eaten my simple dinner: a chicken drumstick, carrot sticks, and a quartered gala apple.

Eating alone, as I have for longer than I care to remember, I thought about one of the times when I was especially stupid.

Several couples were playing Pictionary—you know, the game where clues for words must be drawn on paper in the form of pictures.  On an “all play” I was given the word for our team and one of the girls from the other team was given the word to draw clues for.

I thought about the word and tried to devise the best way I could sketch my clues.  As soon as we started, I drew out a saguaro cactus with three arms.  I then started to sketch a mountain behind the cactus.  As is always the case, both teams were paying attention to both drawings.  Everyone quickly noticed something amiss about our drawings. 

“Wait a minute.  Stop!” the other picturist suggested.  “Let me see the card again.”

She picked up the word card, read it, and laughed.  “The word is ‘dessert’ not ‘desert.’  You know…like pudding.”

I looked at her fledgling drawings of a bowl and a spoon.

For dessert?  Humble pie.

Richard Brautigan wrote a poem about eating dinner alone.  His final lines are these:

“God, I hate eating dinner alone.  It’s like being dead.”

—Mitchell Hegman