a guest at our table

from his column in SunStar Weekend:
Dog-ears in the Wrong Notebook
Lawrence L. Ypil (with his permission)

On the table is set

While we all know how the way we drive (slow and sure, or overly cautious), the way we talk (faster than money, and quick into trouble), and the way we dress (outrageously different, sometimes downright obscene), are probably good indicators of the way we live, perhaps nothing’s as telling about the way we spend our day better than the way we eat.

Slow to chew, or quick to gobble up. Eternally guilty, or perpetually reckless. In hiding, or on show, how we eat may perhaps be as distinctive as our thumbprints, as telling of our inner persuasions as our astrological charts, and as indicative of personal quirks as our handwriting. Funny, how nobody’s bothered to proffer a method of reading our palates (and cleaning our plates).

Easy enough (and almost cliché) to read how a personal love for spicy food, could automatically be read as an attraction to adventure. Or how an addiction to cake could be hiding a hunger for happiness. Or a love for meat, could very well be, well, a love for meat.

But what to make of an obsession with appetizers, and pica-pica, wine in hand, while eternally delaying the slide into the inevitable main course? Or the inability to see the meal as a beautiful sequence of courses, so one dives straight through all parts, all in one go (lest this be the last meal of one’s life)?

What to make of the guy who goes straight for dessert and stays there? What to make of the girl who doesn’t even make it to dessert, because she can’t get enough of the main course?

A few days ago, a friend of mine confessed to always finding himself eternally on cocktails, pre-dinner chitchat galore, while the buffet table was slowly going the wayside of the empty. I myself admitted to going straight for the main course (always loving the meat of the matter), but rarely enjoying it, because my mind was still stuck on the appetizers I knew I missed.

What to make of ourselves when we find ourselves too picky we can’t decide what to eat? Or when we find ourselves too lazy we’d eat anything that was offered?

On the tables of the tongue are set the seats of our hearts: our insecurities and our pleasures, our fears and our joys. We live, whether we know it, by the way we eat.

Pity the man who like the biblical hears-but-doesn’t-listen eats without tasting. What flavors, escape his dire need

Glory be to the secret of it all: that one not wait (or weight!) for the lean months, or the fattened calf, that one eat often, and taste always. That one perpetually remind oneself (lest he forget, and every three-hours, says so the newest diet plan) not the pain of hunger, or the need for food, but the immense pleasure of appetite.