\nMom places Ford’s lunch before him: several boiled shrimp, some fried rice, and a crimson red crawfish, and Ford looks at his plate with proud disbelief and surprise.\n<\/p>\n
\n“Is this a crawfish<\/em>?” \nHe sits there, peering into the crawfish’s tiny boiled black eyes, examining it like some Edwardian curiosity.\n<\/p>\n \n“It’s so cute!” \n“Is this his thorax?” \n“Can I eat it?” \n“Mmm! I like it!”, grinning. “Can I have some more crawfish?” \nShe tells him, “Ford, I’m so impressed with your adventurous palate!”
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“Yep.”\n<\/p>\n
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“Want to touch it, mommy?”\n<\/p>\n
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“Yep, it’s in there. I think his abdomen is in there, too. Well, part of it. Anyway, you eat the tail.”
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“Like a shrimp?”
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“Yep, like a shrimp.”\n<\/p>\n
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“Sure can. Here (I break open the tail, pull out meat, God this looks disgusting, and hand it to Ford)\n<\/p>\n
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I look up at my mother with a faint look of “WTF?”<\/em> and then we both laugh at how cute this really is.\n<\/p>\n
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“I know,” he tells her into his plate quietly.
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And while she and I eat and chat and wrestle Chas through the rest of lunch, Ford continued to eat crawfish. Periodically, however, he obliged the technicolor carcasses to duels sur le table<\/em>, narrating as he went along.\n<\/p>\n