My family, like all families, has its share of quirks that make being a part of it both enjoyable and irritating. Visiting home as infrequently as I do, I often forget , or at least don’t remember to the fullest, the crippling severity that some of these little idiosyncrasies bring to my childhood home, particularly where eating is concerned.

For us, food isn’t the main issue. It’s all about the dishes. Traditionally, in “normal” households the table is set with matching tableware. They may not be the fanciest of plates and bowls, but matching is a goal most of us try very hard to achieve and feel a certain sense of accomplishment when we can actually set a table for six and see that the plates and bowls and flatware all somewhat resemble each other. It takes awhile.

Somewhere in the taking awhile phase of things, we all developed favorites. I blame this on Dad; he is the original My Bowl Is Superior To All Others And Will Not Be Touched By The Urchins Formerly Known As My Wife and Children man. While most men, upon marriage, start using whatever was given to them as wedding gifts, my father brought his own cereal bowl. It is cream, tall and ceramic, and I must admit, is a very fine representation of superior bowlage. However, having your breakfast happiness dependent upon your special bowl can somewhat reduce the authority you might try to use on your children as you try to dissuade them from claiming their own special dishes. In other words, there was no way to not pass on this particular quirk to us kids.

After many years of this, Mom has her special glasses, almost everyone gets touchy if you don’t set their places with the correct spoon/fork/knife combination, and a few have even branched out into the more advanced plate and bowl preferences. Usually, it isn’t a problem. An offended diner has shrieked at most of us often enough to remember that they only use forks with the wavy edges, never the monogrammed ones, and no, they do not care if it’s the letter that begins both their first and last names. You pick this stuff up after awhile, just as you pick up the customs of any alien planet once you’ve visited long enough.

The only time a real problem happened was when we were little kids. Mom bought Tupperware dishes so us children wouldn’t bang up the nice Corel. The dishes came in red, blue and yellow. Now, the plates and bowls didn’t receive too much attention, but the cups, well, there were full scale battles over the cups. My sister, Janice, and I fought over that red cup like our lives depended on it. Bernie, being a boy, automatically claimed the blue one, and my mother would hear nothing of us taking that one from him, so one of us was going to get stuck with the nasty, ugly yellow cup, and one of us would get the splendidly bright red cup.

We bickered for at least two weeks until one lunch time when Mom reached her limit. She wrote the colors of the cups on little slips of paper and made us draw. Whatever happened was final, and the loser wasn’t allowed to whine about it.

I drew the yellow one. My little sister gloated mercilessly. Every meal for at least a year after she won the red cup she would smirk at me while sipping her drink. In time, the cup rivalry fizzled out. We matured a little, and more cups were brought into the house. A few years down the road my brother started to bicker over the yellow cup, not because he preferred the color, but because he had gnawed on his cup, as little boys do, and it was unpleasant to drink from. Being six years older than my brother, my cup had been spared the bites and was relatively untouched. The bickering ended when my mother reaffirmed that it was, indeed, still my cup.

Today, almost twenty years later, my husband brought me a drink of grapefruit juice. He had poured it into the coveted red cup. I admit, I sipped my drink with the glee of a six year old who has finally gotten what she wanted. Jan is half way around the world, and here I gloat.