I had dinner last night with Mabel Watson Payne while her parents shared a rare evening out together. Mabel and I shared gnocchi from Sweet Wooodruff. When we walked in to pick it up, the dedicated young people who run the place warmly greeted Mabel by name. She waved and nodded to everyone, like a friendly but slightly reserved miniature queen. Back at home, in addition to the gnocchi, she ate carrots, grapes, cheese cubes and a slice of her Daddy's homemade organic peanut-butter-bread. But this took a long time because there was also a lot of absorbing dinner-table conversation going on. With many explanatory gestures.
When dessert time arrived for the tapioca pudding, I made my own fussy grandfatherly decision to take off the new dress Mabel had been wearing as a top layer – because she has become extremely keen on using her own little silver spoon (inherited from a great-grandmother) to eat her own beloved ta-ta. Tidiness not yet a priority.
In the picture immediately above, Mabel inadvertently reveals a characteristic inherited along the maternal line and known to that side of her family as "the Fisher stare."