The Dinner Party

A bit about what to expect if you find yourself at my table

I should tell you first that I adore cloth napkins. We have three matching sets of four for the home and two sets of two for the Airstream. I’m particular about them, leaning into florals that aren’t too flowery, but invoke some sort of vague South Asian paisley as their main mode. Cloth napkins make for intentional dining - they make a meal feel like an occasion, even if you’re juggling bits of a broken scone in your lap on a bus ride and calling it breakfast. They feel extravagant, but are paradoxically eco-chic, too.

My friend and eco-connoiseur Maggie introduced me to modern eclectic cloth napkin using, principally as a micro movement against the tide of climate change. We co-led a retreat an eon ago at Ojo Caliente and rather than dumping loads of cheap garbage and individually-wrapped tokens into a hospitality bag for our attendees, we provided each one with a uniquely patterned and lovingly laundered napkin of their own. Mine is still in my laptop bag, having been used in myriad ways in the ensuing decade. It was once a face mask on the back of a 4x4 on the dusty inner roads of Nosara, Costa Rica, as I held on for dear life riding into town and back to fetch mail that had been mis-delivered (although all mail is mis-delivered in Costa Rica - addresses are truncated breadcrumb poetry)

“From the blue roofed cafe in Playa Guiones,
Take the second road north
to the end, past the pasture of horses.
From there, look towards the water
and find a yellow boat…”

So much more romantic than a number, and a name, right?

On another occasion, in Northern California, this napkin was used to collect and briefly keep road-side blackberries, who consider themselves wild.

And of course, a hammock for the cream-rich scones in Ireland, lovingly prepared by the host of the true three roomed Bed & Breakfast who couldn’t see me off without something savory and herby for later. For the road, knowing it would only take me from her and never back. A harmonic of my grandmother whose essence was and will forever more be to squirrel away sustenance.

It has wiped tears and sopped up spills, held back my hair and drawn more than one set of airplane seat mate’s eyes when it popped out to protect my lap and whatever I was wearing from whatever I was eating, in service of me avoiding pant laundry as long as possible.

The sets I have collected rarely operate as a perfect team, as we seem to always have odd numbers for dinner, as was the case at the dinner party. Representatives from a few different sets held a bowl of naan bread and presented sets of silver. One sacrificed itself to mop up spilled water, and each was used, holding the room together in a way that only fabric seems able to do.

My talents were enlisted to prepare aloo gobi and chocolate zucchini cake, an unlikely pairing of staples of my successful recipes arsenal predicated by The Abundance, which is what I call the farm share. Each week for the past month we have eagerly waited to receive produce we’ve paid much more than market value for, in the hopes that the food is local and the soil is cared for and the farmers don’t turn to tricks of internet stardom or whoredom. Agriculture is thankless and romantic, idealized and under appreciated, as though it were the industrial representation of motherhood.

The abundance inspires me to deal with it, and him to invite others to share in it, which is how our Friday table came to be cleared of work detritus, and set, and then burdened with reorganized abundance.

It was a party of five, one shy of the seating we have, so no one was forced to sit on patio furniture or the floor. He was the center of the universe connecting the other four of us, and so I felt gratefully peripheral as I watched conversation dance about shared story lines I’ve only seen in the rear view.

Until, of course, it happened.

She asked me about how I came to know Bitty, which is a question that has a very simple answer. Bitty is the dog who found our friend. One might answer by saying, “she’s our friend’s dog,” but that true statement is a hologram of the truth. A bit like saying your spouse of 50 years is “a guy you once knew.”

Bitty is my soul mate.

I mean. Seriously.

She found our friend when she was very young and hungry, turned away from a deplorable breeder with nefarious intents for being the runt, or possibly forgotten.

She landed in his yard, and took him in.

He in turn, took her to the shelter, which is what one does with dogs who wander beneath their apple trees uninvited. He hadn’t been praying for her, but after putting in her time waiting for her previous owners who never came, our friend was informed that she was not adoptable, as her breed is bred to cause trouble. Unless of course, he wanted her…

So he took her home, and a year or so later, we met in an unremarkable way at a dry and forlorn dog park, sometime in early November after the election had been settled but before things got very bad.

I explained none of this at the dinner party, and instead what sprang forth from me began on the evening of December 26th, 2020, which is precisely the moment when things got very bad.

My memory of the dinner party is not precisely first person, but a bit above myself and off to the right, in a place most often occupied by the Angel of the backstory, who most often sits quietly on her hands and waits to speak until spoken to.

[She’s here with me now in the bath as I type this with my thumbs, a latte that isn’t exactly about napkins or Bitty or dinner, but more about her and the things she has to say.]

At dinner, she spurred bits and fragments of irrelevant soliloquy until my person gently interrupted her and said,

“She asked about Bitty.”

Exhibit A: snuggle champion

And eventually I got to the part about Bitty sleeping on my chest in the sleepless nights of the darkest winter. Bitty who insisted that we rest, whose body held the shards of me that had had a gauntlet of a year, and day of decisions, and week from hell, and fall of terror. Bitty who knew that I could not answer her questions, so she kept them to herself. And when I woke in the night and opened my phone to check the lab reports - both for reassurance that he was still alive and confirmation that he was still marginally in the same condition in which I left him, she simply stood and circled my bones, emphatically replacing herself on top of me.

She did not mother or patronize. She did not ask or yell. She never cried or had opinions on the matter. In the morning she let me go, and at night she helped stave off the demons that conflate trauma with intuition and seed nightmares and flashbacks.

Bitty is my place of refuge, you see?

How can I do her justice with a simple sentence or haiku?

I cannot. Not in my house, not at my table. At my table the unfiltered complexity of the full truth is served between unlikely courses, atop linens who each have their own history to hold.

And you? You dear reader get the slightly more refined retelling - a meandering quad shot macchiato of lyricism and trauma, rolled together like aloo gobi and chocolate zucchini cake.

Thanks for reading,
K