This was a short story that was in a compilation that I read in grade school around 1976. The plot was an old man (a grandfather, I believe) who was despised by his family and made to sit in the corner to eat his bowl of soup for dinner. It was very emotional and upsetting to me.
This is the Grimm Brothers fairy tale “The Old Man and his Grandson.” It’s been in many different collections, retellings and translations, so I don’t know what book or collection you might have seen it in.
There may be more than one version of the story, it’s’ generally known as “The Wooden Bowl”. Basically: Grandfather is old and his hands shake, he keeps dropping and breaking his dinner plate, so is made to sit in the corner to eat. Father starts to carve a wooden bowl or trough for Grandfather to eat from, then notices his own son also carving or gluing a crude wood bowl. Father asks the son why, son answers that it’s for Father when Father gets old. Father has a change of heart and lets Grandfather come back to eat at the table.
There’s several versions, Joyce Nowell Butler has a book in English and Spanish, featuring a purple-shirted boy holding a bowl made of popsicle sticks. Hope this helps.
I don’t know which anthology the story was in, but the story itself is most likely “The Old Grandfather and His Little Grandson.” I’ve seen it attributed to the Brother Grimm, and it was also retold by Leo Tolstoy.
The basic story is that the old grandfather had become increasingly infirm, so that bits of food would sometimes fall out of his mouth at the table. His son and daughter-in-law were disgusted by this, so they made him eat in the corner behind the stove. Then, when he broke the dish he was eating from, the daugter-in-law replaced it with a wooden bowl. A few days later, the old man’s son and the son’s wife saw their own young son playing with a few bits of wood. When they asked what he was doing, he explained that he was making a wooden trough for his own parents to eat from when they became old. The boy’s parents were then ashamed at the way they’d treated the old man, and from then on they let him eat at the table with them and treated him better.
You can find the story in many editions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, usually under the title “The Old Man and his Grandson”. (It is not one of their more common stories, so not all collections of Grimm’s Fairy Tales include it.) You can also find it in some anthologies of Tolstoy’s short stories, under the title “The Old Grandfather and His Little Grandson.” It seems like I’ve also seen a version of the same story somewhere under the title “The Wooden Bowl.”
A great big thank you to everyone who answered this! It stuck with me all of these years and I remember it made me cry in class when we read it – really looking forward to rereading it as an adult. Thanks again!