Your Incentive For Reaching Out Hazy

Dear Miss Manners: I’m not sure I seek etiquette advice, but maybe… Almost 30 years ago, I had an affair, and a daughter was born. The lady and I parted, she married, and her husband adopted the girl.

When the daughter came of age, I wrote to her. She responded with demands for money and much vituperation. I broke off relations.

Now, in her late 20s, she has resumed writing and she seems very nice. She never asks for money. She does, however, often allude to my other children and she does ask for details about my life, which I have not given her.

My wife knows of her and, after some rough times, we are very comfortable together. My children do not know about her. I am afraid she might tell them. I’m sure my children would explode once and then repair the damage, and we would be in good shape; still, I don’t want it to happen.

Is this an etiquette question? If so, any advice?

Gentle reader: Perhaps we should start with your explaining to Miss Manners what you would have considered proper etiquette on the part of a daughter in response to belated paternal overtures.

Not a financial claim. Nor an emotional claim. Nor a request for her family history. And certainly not any attempt to know her half siblings.

So, why did you get in touch with her? Did you hope for a letter from camp: “I’m fine, having lots of fun, but I miss you, Daddy, love and kisses; P.S., the counselors make us write home before dinner”?

Now to your query, which is whether you have an etiquette problem.

As you can hardly expect Miss Manners to assure you that you behaved like a perfect gentleman, you must be referring to the awkwardness of perhaps having to acknowledge a fact whose consequences you had successfully eluded for 30 years.

Miss Manners’ guess is that this will not come up. Having been so thoroughly rejected by you, and put off even after you initiated contact, the young lady is not likely to feel that she is welcome in your home.

Should it arise, you would best behave with extreme humility and graciousness. If you have no other incentive to do so, you may be assured that your legitimate children will be watching you to see how you might have treated them had they been born at an inconvenient time for you.

Dear Miss Manners: Since dinnerware manufacturers choose to no longer include bread and butter plates in dinnerware sets, how is one to handle bread and butter at the table? We have been using saucers, but these are also being eliminated in some cases and replaced with mugs.

Gentle reader: Have you thought of replacing your allegiance to your dinnerware?

Miss Manners is not suggesting that you rid yourself of the plates you possess, but that you take advantage of the opportunity to mix in another, complementary pattern - say a solid color if your pattern has a design, or a design if it doesn’t - until the original plates dwindle and you can make a complete switch if you are tired of eclecticism.

Or you could use supplementary plates of glass. Or you could hang loyally on, eating from a single trough when your manufacturer decides nothing else is necessary.

Dear Miss Manners: At an informal business meeting in a local restaurant, my colleague and luncheon companion, a well-educated man with a Ph.D. from a prestigious university who heads the state branch of a well-known nonprofit organization, frequently picked his nose and then ate the results of his efforts.

I was understandably shocked and perplexed. I chose to ignore this bizarre behavior, rather than embarrass him. What should I have done?

Gentle Reader: Pretended not to notice, and frankly, Miss Manners wishes you hadn’t.