WHAT WE EAT at the end of a meal marks its passage. If we have eaten well, our hearts and bellies full, the occasion will be bittersweet. Conversation will have slowed, the night’s slope tilted.
What seemed like it would last forever now seems certain to be nearly done.
I am always grateful for a little more time at the table; the meal must pass somehow, and I am better consoled with one more taste than with the rather less voluptuary sound of a gong.
If a meal cannot go on forever I