Together at the Table

Nowadays families eat in their cars, eat standing up, eat in the shower practically but once: things were different.Once what times we had in the great days of the family meal!In the house I grew up in, we talked so much at the table it was a wonder anybody got any food down at all. Weeknight meals, Sunday dinners, holiday feasts: each took a full hour as we kids sat and listened to our five (count ‘em) grownups hold forth.On and on our grandfather would go: about President Wilson’s and the League of Nations, about the assassination of President McKinley, about Lindbergh’s flight talking of these events as if they had happened just yesterday. (We all know about the Lindbergh flight but how many little kids learned know about the two French aviators how went down trying to match Lindy’s triumph?) And these meals took an hour ONLY IF our grandfather didn’t then decide we should get down on our knees and recite the Rosary, right there at the table, each of us crouching with heads bent and forearms resting on the the seats of our chairs.We moved from that happy house when I was nine but I can still see the shadowy old dining room with its oak paneling and its heavy velvet drapes that separated it from the front parlor. Our grownups drew them when the nights were cold and an East wind off the Atlantic rattled those big front window. To my sister and me they were like the curtains at a theatre and the room itself was like a stage set, where any dramatic thing might happen -even beyond the falling-to-our-knees part after the meal. Forty years before at that table, our pretty aunt Grace was only eight, her elders stifled laughter as she read aloud her book report in those same French aviators who, poor things, had gas for 40 hours.  I knew that story and I wanted to make my older people laugh too, so in the show-off-y way of the family baby, I stood up next to my chair and did imitations of a girdle ad showing how little constrained this one housewife felt by what was basically a straitjacket without the arms.  I also did the prologue to the old Superman show at warp speed, which turns out to be the only way you CAN do it; “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane it’s SUPerman!” it began. I can recite the whole thing to this day. And I killed ‘em in that house off Blue Hill Ave.But most dramatic time came when our tiny great aunt, was born a scant year after Lincoln’ death, fell sound asleep during dinner and fell right over onto the rug. Didn’t she jump right up though, dust herself off and scoot back to the pantry to fetch the pie she had baked.From the apples she had peeled. And quartered.And even picked herself.I see her now in her baggy dress and her little blue Keds and her falling-down hose that wound like the red banner on a barbershop pole around her skinny legs. I see her and I miss her.I guess thought my sister and I could stay forever at that family table and be looking at those same dear faces, but no. The faces are different now if no less dear. And the times are different too, God knows God knows.I hope that you all  find a table to gather round this weekend, as you eat, and laugh and tell stories. Let’s all send up a prayer too, even if we’re not kneeling by our chairs when we do it. 

Morning Has Broken

This morning the bare tree limbs outside these windows nod and shift and look to me like a gathering of stags as they lower and raise their antlered heads. The rain is gone and with it the warm windy air mass. It's below freezing. The flowers I’ve arranged for our Thanksgiving table rest in the tiny north-facing bathroom whose thermostat registers a nose-biting 52 degrees. No wilting there!I have made the coffee and eaten a little breakfast and David is reading the paper.  When our son Michael gets up, he and I can tackle the spinach-with-raisins-and-pine-nuts dish, the only ‘real’ thing I have to prepare this year.Last Sunday, our daughter Carrie and her Chris borrowed from us 20 sets of china and silverware, three gravy boats, two ladles and two white tablecloths, a store of things accumulated here over the last 35 years. Thanksgiving is at their house, so instead of waking at 5 to jam a giant bird into a too-small oven, David and I slept until 7, which was nice since we were up 'til almost 2:00 so as to greet our returning son, home for the weekend from faraway Arkansas.I’m to make the gravy when we get to their house, that being my only other job. I have packed the chicken stock and the non-clumping flour, my best sieve and a good pot, and that wondrous invention the gravy separator. I've packed the coffee, which I wanted to brew myself and also a can of salted peanuts just like we had when I was little, the nice greasy kind, in the very bowl in which our grownups served them too.Carrie and Chris live in a house built exactly 50 years ago, so they have decreed this a 1963 Thanksgiving and planned foods and drinks to match that theme.Easy enough! I thought, on hearing that, for inside my head it is at once 1963 and 1958 and 1979 when we first moved to this old house, a young couple with two babies, and began doing the holidays ourselves.I hope everyone's day is nice as ours promises to be. The dark comes early but oh this morning light! - and family to enjoy it with. Happy Thanksgiving to all!