Coda

Riding home from Massachusetts usually means stopping at Rein’s deli, which is about at the halfway mark on Connecticut’s Route 84 regardless of where you happen to be coming from or going to. Rather magical, that. Everyone stops at Rein’s, except for NFA, which prefers to stop at malls to buy sweater vests and to play football. And I do mean everyone. As in, witness the following.

So Saturday night at around 8:30 we pull into Rein’s with our entire group. Being a tad on the large side, we break down into two smaller segments. The mostly male factor (or most of the malefactors, take your pick) went off together to order vast quantities of soup, while the rest of us were herded into a back room where one other large table was filled with people who looked remarkably…familiar. They looked at us, we looked at them; a mix of adults and teenagers, many of them well too dressed up for normal everyday existence. In fact, their adults were dressed up too, and I’ve never seen so many bowties in one place (and I hope never to do so again, for that matter). “Are you coming from the debate tournament?” one of them asked. Normally we would simply respond yes to this question, but there was something a little off in all of this, because these were definitely not the debaters I am used to. Speecho-Americans was my guess, and I responded accordingly. After speaking to these folks for a minute, we learned they were in fact from the NCFCA, the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association, the speech and debate league for home-schooled students. Pretty cool, I thought. If you take debaters—a rowdy and mixed group, to put it mildly—and Christianize and home-school them, they come out looking like Speecho-Americans. Sorta makes sense, when you think about it.

Anyhow, we had our dinner, which was the usual challenge of Sailor v. Coach. Forwhomthe Ben ordered a corned beef sandwich, making sure with the bemused waitress that it contain no peanuts or milk in it anywhere. I was tempted to explain the concept of kosher to him, but couldn’t figure out a way to include legumes in the discussion, so I let it pass. Then there was our student who had never had, apparently, either a reuben, corned beef, rye bread or Russian dressing, but was game and enjoyed her introduction to deli food leaving nary a bite. SuperSquirrel and I compared nasty foods we wouldn’t hesitate to eat, and although both of us love a nice rabbit, she drew the line at cervelle aux buerre nois, which used to be my standard Wednesday lunch back in the seventies at a restaurant since immortalized in Nostrum (thank you, Jules and Mite). The Panivore, fresh from victory, suffered mild apoplexy during this conversation, but given that she is in a permanent state of malnutrition, what do you expect? I keep waiting to see her picture in a magazine with a plea to send money to feed and save this child!

After these festivities were concluded, as I was paying, the leader of the NCFCA pack started chatting me up. His real question was, how do we get judges, and I explained the concept of paying college flaneurs students good money to do the job, although I pointed out that to some extent we also relied on parents. “Ah, yes,” he replied. “Parent judges versus student judges. I used to debate myself when I was a kid. We always hated the parent judges.”

“You were a debater?” I asked, not the wittiest reply ever, but I was full of corned beef (no milk or peanuts) and French fries, so my brain wasn’t its normally active self.

“Yes,” he said, pulling on the ends of his bowtie. “You said you were from Hendrick Hudson? I used to debate them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you go to high school?” I asked.

I should have been able to guess the answer. “Bronx Science,” he replied.

Aback was I taken! I suddenly had visions of O’C twenty years from now, transformed into a Christian Home School Debate Coach. The mind boggled.

I wished my new Bronx Science alum friend good luck, and went screaming out into the night.

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