The Dining Room Table

The Dining Room table. First, it wasn’t in the dining room, but rather in the family room that was open to the kitchen. And it wasn’t a “dining room table”, it was a command center. It was where my mother sat to talk to her friends, to talk on the phone, to have a cup of tea with us when we got home from school to celebrate a good day, or to commiserate over a bad day. When we moved to St Louis, she got a round dinette table, with a white background and a single wonderfully colorful blue and green petalled flower in the center of it that took up almost the entire table top. And since she didn’t like people scooting chairs around, esp over carpeting, she bought narrow stenographer chairs on casters to go around it, that allowed more chairs to fit and everyone to move freely. Quickly outgrown, that table was replaced with a MUCH larger round top mounted on a heavy cast iron pedestal base that had been made out of the street cover for a gas main in the city. The table sat between the kitchen, the section of the room designated as the family room with a fancy console tv and stereo (children’s bedrooms on the other side of the tv from the table), the hallway to the front door, hallway to the garage door and the Oversized sliding glass doors that took up the entire back wall of the room leading to the patio and back yard. While we were seldom bored, if we were, we could read the Sunday comics that were printed on the colorful fabric that she had made curtains out of for the back wall. From the table, my mother could watch the children playing outside, see anyone coming in any of the doors monitor what was going on in the kitchen, hear if a child woke up from a nap and talk to her friends. Dinner time at the big table, with anywhere from my parents and 5 kids still at home plus friends and extended family was typically a fun time. So much fun that my older sister Pat and my Mother would start laughing. And Laughing. And Laughing. So much so, that they BOTH would sometimes wet their pants. We use to joke that they couldn’t catch each other’s eye at the table without bursting into laughter then running to the bathroom. The table was usually Gloriously messy, covered with the bits and pieces of everyday life – from school projects, to backpacks and purses on. My mother wrote down the foods my father liked and those he didn’t. Rice was “poor man’s food”, so we girls ate that when Dad was out of town. Bananas – for years, we girls all thought we hated bananas. It wasn’t until we were adults that my mother confessed that because Dad liked bananas on his morning cereal, she convinced us that we didn’t like them, so we wouldn’t eat up Dad’s bananas. We seldom ate out, but when we did it was an occasion. On one such occasion, the whole family scattered to get ready. When I came out of my room, I discovered that they had left without me! They didn’t even realize it until they got home, walked in the house and saw my thunderous face! When they moved to Tennessee, the big table went along, but it wasn’t the same, with no kids at home to sit around it teasing each other and having a cup of tea with Mom.