The Feeding of the Five Thousand

What was initially designed as a nice, small dinner for three (Auggie, Shui, and me) rapidly evolved into a miniture banquet for many times that original number. While the menu remained the same (chicken pasta primavera with asparagus, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, zuccini, and mushrooms; garlic bread; baby lettuce mix with poppy seed dressing; and fruit sorbet in real fruit shells for dessert), the quantities of the ingredients had to increase dramatically, or else the portion size for each guest would need to be deplorably small.

When the first few people heard about our meal and asked to be included, that was no problem, but when Shui sent out a mass mail inviting the multitudes to join us, I started to feel the pressure. [Incidentally, the difficulties were not ameliorated when one previously uninvited guest received said mass mail and became quite livid at not having been asked earlier. I had (what I felt was) a very good reason, namely that he was the losing party in a certain love triangle, and being around the happy couple would have proved awkward and possibly depression-inducing, but that is a whole other blog...] With little other choice, I accepted the demands that hosting an additional eleven people would comprise, and began preparations for 14 guests.

Then, on the day of the party, a whole new clew* came out of the woodwork, people who had not RSVPed as per the instructions of the mass invite, some of whom informed me of their place at the table a mere two hours before dinner was to be served! In the immortal words of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, "But people came that like, did not RSVP, so I was like, totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier!"**

Yet while I was hauling ass, redistributing food, totally buggin' and delivering a furious diatribe against the total inconsideration of replying on the day of an event, it remained to be seen whether or not "more" would truly prove to be "merrier." While cooking, I realized there probably wasn't enough pasta for a full 20 people, (since that was a 43% increase over the extended guest list, and a full 567% increase from the original party-of-three). And naturally, more pasta meant more vegetables to be mixed into the pasta, and more sauce to be poured on top. So Shui went out to the grocery store to pick up the extra provisions, while from the kitchen I beseeched the Powers that be for some help.

As I stirred the linguini, I was reminded of the feeding of the five thousand:

And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick. And when it was evening, his disciples came to him, saying, "This is a desert place, and the time is now past; send the multitude away, that they may go into the villages, and buy themselves victuals."

But Jesus said unto them, "They need not depart; give ye them to eat."

And they said unto him, "We have here but five loaves, and two fishes."

He said, "Bring them hither to me." And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.

And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside women and children. (Matthew 14:14-21).

And lo and behold! By the end of our dinner, everyone had eaten his or her share of food, and there was more than enough pasta, garlic bread, and fruit sorbets, though I do think we ran out of salad. This is not to say that I could have filled 12 baskets with our leftovers, but it was certainly evident to me that Shui's last minute run to the supermarket was unneeded, since the amount of uneaten food equaled or surpassed the amount he had gone to buy.

PTL! We can enter this little event as another chapter in the Apocryphal book of JT: "Woe unto those who attendeth a banquet, yet without an R.S.V.P., for surely the LORD's righteous anger shall burn against such men. They that reapeth of the table, yet without having sowed according to the R.S.V.P. date, have nothing to do with such men, for their god is their belly, their glory is in their shame, and their end is destruction. Yet perchance if they repent of their iniquity, the LORD may be moved to have compassion upon their helpless estate, and may yet show them his lovingkindness. Just as you have seen in these last days, it came to pass that as surely as the five thousand were fed on five loaves and two fish, all the guests at JT's dinner party ate their portion and were filled. Though the portion of food was fit for only fourteen, yet the men and women there numbered twenty, and the leftovers filled at least two pasta bowls."

*A "clew" is not a mistyping of "clue" or "claw," but one of the terms for a congregation of worms. A clew can also be a ball of yarn or thread, so it is easy to imagine how such a term could easily come to be associated with a bunch of long, legless annelids.

**In her speech and debate class, Cher is pitted against Amber on the topic of immigration. Having been assigned the "pro" stance, she offers the following argument: "So, OK, like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all 'What about the strain on our resources?' But it's like, when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I said R.S.V.P. because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that like, did not R.S.V.P. so I was like, totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier! And so, if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion, may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty?"