Hover over the table with your friends. Everyone is commenting about how pretty the layout is. Stab an olive with a twice-used toothpick. It’s about saving the forests after all. Or glance furtively around the table. No one is looking. Grab one between thumb and index finger. Double dip the cheese melt with a cold green bean. No one noticed that first bite. Dip the other end. Hands are clean and dry. Now reach across the table and shake hands with a friend you haven’t seen in at least a week or two. On the return from that greeting, swoop down and land a chunk of sweet pineapple.
Moving on to the new year.
The crowd is still forming. Scotch eggs, maple-iced doughnuts, French roast coffee, artichoke dip, veggies, nuts, wassail. Before the morning passes, sixty or so friends will crowd in around the table, serve a plate, exchange greetings, and tell tales of the year gone by, hopes for the year ahead and mostly true stories from all the walks of community life.
Our love is manifest in food and words.
How will we greet 2021? There is virtually no safe and healthy way to do it the way we have been doing it. But January is so far in the future. We can hope.
South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast 
Perhaps pitch a tent in the back yard (a party tent); have everyone bring their own snacks and drinks; leave all the doors and gates open so no one has to touch anything; wear a mask in which you poked a hole for a spoon or fork and a straw…..and party down.
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Ms. Panasci, that sounds like one of those parties they used to throw over in the finance office. Bring your own paper plates, snacks and drinks.
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