The Done Signal

When I was a child, my mother used to get annoyed with my father for signaling that he was done eating his meal by shoving his plate aside.  Usually, the rest of us were still eating, and my mother felt pressured to interrupt her own meal to get up, remove his plate, rinse it in the sink and put it in the dishwasher.

That behavior never really bothered me, probably because I was a kid and