Everyday Canvas

September 18, 2021

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 
“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”― Stephen King
How do you feel about someone reading through dinner? Do you agree with King that exceptions should be made?

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Reading is my favorite (a)vocation. There is no problem for me to read something at the table, but only if I am the only one there.

If I am eating with others, I expect myself and everyone else to pay attention to the food and the company. This has nothing to do with politeness, but it has to do more with being anti-social and lacking respect for the food and consideration to the family and company.

The exception may be if the entire family accepts someone reading at the table or if dinnertime is also the reading time for the family. For example, if there is an enthusiastic child who is just learning to read and s/he is too involved with this task, I think. temporarily, it is okay for that child to read at the table.

On the other hand, one has to take into account that in our busy lives, we rarely see and relate to one another even in the same family, and eating together can close this gap in some way.

As to agreeing with Stephen King, as accomplished as he is, I don’t think I do, but not because it is rude to read at the table, but because it harms the family relationships, and each good writer has to know more about relationships to be able to write about them and to come up with believable characters, if writing fiction.

For: "Space Blog" 

Prompt: From 🎼 RRodgersWrites 🎶 ’ "🏆 A Piece of Our Ancestors" 
Write about ancestors.

Beautiful poem, btw, about holding a piece of one’s family’s past. You just have to read it.

As to ancestors, they are our forefathers and mothers possibly with a genetic relationship. According to Scientific American, “Humans are all more closely related than we commonly think.”

This is because when researching our families’ pasts, branches mostly don’t go on their way and away. Instead, many of our ancestors occupy multiple slots in our family trees. In other words, we are all inbred, which makes us all relatives if not in the near past but in the distant past. As the magazine suggests, we all may have something in us from Queen Nefertiti, for example.

Something to think about, especially when we war and fight with one another. Don’t you think?