dinner-table talk
The day Mother announced milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with Father’s OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta.
Context
Troeltsch's powdered-milk trauma comes with a thumbnail of his father: the man who signed off ("with Father's OK") on the switch to powdered milk and thereby "knuckl[ed] under like Roosevelt at Yalta." It's played for laughs, but the portrait is the capitulating father — the one who cedes the household's ground and whose small surrenders his children file away as history. A light texture-datum on the deflated-patriarch pole, the father remembered mainly for what he gave in on.