The Wedding Gift

There is a set of cups and plates, dinnerware, we have in the front room of our house, the front of which is being undone right now for obscure reasons which somehow relate to house value as well as competitive ambition with the neighbors, and the dining room faces out on the front lawn, well-cut but not professionally done, where we will sometimes set up for dinner when the occasion merits use of the cups and plates. So, I had invited a friend down to my hometown, a blue-collar beachside town, to eat, laugh, enjoy the sun, see my origins, and to also allow him some respite from the city, which can be a monstrous thing. He was enjoying himself, doing the aforementioned activities, laughing, drinking, being in the sun, examining who I was and had become, or still was, and there was no need for the dinnerware. We did not eat from the paper plates and plastic utensils, which we will sometimes use on these occasions of relaxed intimacy, but metal forks and spoons, and the nice laminated plates. Although I did find it to be strange, eating from a material not quite the cups and plates in the dining room case, which a woman named Doyle who worked in the rectory bought as a wedding gift for my mother, Waterford Crystal, and not the disposable paper and plastic usually accorded to the occasion of an early summer barbeque, perhaps as the summer proceeds we will use the paper and plastic, and in any case, he didn’t notice.

Forgive me but the story has been entered twice since that is all I went to tell, and the limits of this contest insist I do so. Nothing is meant to be extracted from this doubling. Read it alone for maximum effect on a word processor, copy & paste into chosen medium, or tear it out.

There is a set of cups and plates, dinnerware, we have in the front room of our house, the front of which is being undone right now for obscure reasons which somehow relate to house value as well as competitive ambition with the neighbors, and the dining room faces out on the front lawn, well-cut but not professionally done, where we will sometimes set up for dinner when the occasion merits use of the cups and plates. So, I had invited a friend down to my hometown, a blue-collar beachside town, to eat, laugh, enjoy the sun, see my origins, and to also allow him some respite from the city, which can be a monstrous thing. He was enjoying himself, doing the aforementioned activities, laughing, drinking, being in the sun, examining who I was and had become, or still was, and there was no need for the dinnerware. We did not eat from the paper plates and plastic utensils, which we will sometimes use on these occasions of relaxed intimacy, but metal forks and spoons, and the nice laminated plates. Although I did find it to be strange, eating from a material not quite the cups and plates in the dining room case, which a woman named Doyle who worked in the rectory bought as a wedding gift for my mother, Waterford Crystal, and not the disposable paper and plastic usually accorded to the occasion of an early summer barbeque, perhaps as the summer proceeds we will use the paper and plastic, and in any case, he didn’t notice.

Forgive me but the story has been entered twice since that is all I went to tell, and the limits of this contest insist I do so. Nothing is meant to be extracted from this doubling. Read it alone for maximum effect on a word processor, copy & paste into chosen medium, or tear it out.