Song for before dinner
Lyrics
may i remember to taste my food may i remember to chew may my napkin be fortuitously placed may tonight our knives aim true and though we are hungry let us still eat slowly and notice each moment occur may my napkin be fortuitously placed may tonight our knives aim true and though we are tired let us still listen and pay attention for this is all that we have this food, this room, and the people within it lets remember and always give thanks
Music
Chords
verse1: G, G7, C, G, D, G, G7, C, G, D, G
verse2&3: C, G, D, G, G7, C, G, D, G
Structure
A B B
Songwriter Notes
I meant to spend more time with this song. Right now it's a bit too long to sing before dinner. Actually I imagined a very short pattern that had many verses so that you could choose how much (or little) to sing. Like you do with a hymnal. Sing verse 1, 3, 5...
Comments
This song is beautiful. The first stanza is pretty much pure gold, in my opinion, and the rest is close behind. The best part is that it is about togetherness, and not about the food itself. I'm going to go way out on a limb here, and this is going to sound crazy, but this song brings to mind an interview of my very favorite curmudgeonly reactionary essayist, talking about how he thinks many of the problems in the world today are caused in part by short-sighted selfishness:
"The idea that one's pleasure or desire of the moment is the only thing that counts leads to antisocial behaviour. Let me give a small and seemingly trivial example of this.
About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together - they graze, finding what they want in the fridge, and eating in a solitary fashion whenever they feel like it (which is usually often), irrespective of the other people in the household.
This means that they never learn that eating is a social activity (many of the prisoners in the prison in which I worked had never in their entire lives eaten at a table with another person); they never learn to discipline their conduct; they never learn that the state of their appetite at any given moment should not be the sole consideration in deciding whether to eat or not. In other words, one's own interior state is all-important in deciding when to eat. And this is the model of all their behaviour."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think if everyone in this country sang this song every night before dinner with their families, the world would probably be a non-trivially better place. So... nice work on that. Geez.
(As a brief aside, I really love how the "may i" framing of the lines implies that the singer is requesting these things, which makes the song very like a prayer, at least for me.)
Thanks for this one, it's a real inspiration.
Gabemcelwain 12:22, 9 July 2008 (PDT)
