In my home of origin we ate meals together at the dining room table. All meals, without question. As I have navigated deeper into my adulthood, I realize this is not the norm for everyone (nor is it how I live my life today). It's one of the sentinel things I think is wrong with us. The small us, as in, me and my family, and the big us, an America fraying and singed.
I think so much of what is unsaid and unaddressed could be resolved if we made the effort to clear the table and dine together as an act of faith to nurture intimacy with people we value.
The six places at the dining table in the home of the Kwinns were designated. My mother, who is left-handed, sat to my left around one long edge of the oil-cloth draped oval. This allowed us to both eat with our dominant hands without knocking elbows. To her left, at the head, sat my brother, so she had easy access to both children. Across from me was my father, who was bordered on each side by empty chairs, as there have only ever been four of us.
Rooted in midwestern sensibilities, we each had vinyl placemats, and there was a standing napkin holder in the middle of the table filled with disposable paper napkins. But unlike the tables of most people, the vacant chairs did not sit behind vacant placemats, but piles of systematically sorted, stamped, and partially processed mail, all within easy reach of my father. Magazines, bills, political postcards, coupons, newsletters, and statements. Post-it notes with microscopic scribbles. Important ideas, lists, and the pageantry of his particular letter opener and date stamp and pad.
There was ritual - still is, I imagine - in the receiving, the sorting, the stamping, the opening, and the stacking. The mail was important. It reminded the receiver that they were important, too.
Food was plated in the kitchen and brought to the table, so there were never dishes from which to serve oneself. While I'm quite confident this came from the economy of dish usage and toddler-food-allocation, this practice preserved the landscape of the table without requiring precious acreage between the placemats. Spilled milk was cause for alarm - a true flurry of hurried response lifting nearby piles onto chairs, pulled safely back from the table.
Only on very special occasions, like an adult dinner guest were the piles relocated to file boxes and whisked to the basement, causing visible distress to my father. We rarely had more than two guests, but occasionally the ceremony of the table leaves and the fancy table cloth meant we might have three. Part of me fears that evidence of each such party is entombed in it's own box somewhere in the bowels of the basement, which one horrible day I will need to reckon with.
When I got married and moved into my first real home, my parents bought us a very large dining table with three leaves at the Goodwill. It was an excellent price - the table was $15 because the legs were not... what one might call... secure. They wiggled and wobbled like loose teeth, especially if all three leaves were installed, so we had to carefully wedge them into the depths of our blue shag carpeting. The large table made me so happy because it meant we could have enormous dinner parties.
Some of my most favorite moments at my home on the canyon, the early years of my marriage, were the generous Fezziwig-inspired Bohemian dinner parties. Most of the time, we didn't so much set the table and place all of the possible silverware in glasses as centerpieces, allowing each person to select what they needed (which was sometimes an iced tea or a grapefruit spoon). We rescued extra chairs out of the dumpster and gave them new life, brought in the patio furniture, and once loaded 27 people into our humble great room.
Many times, we had dinner parties for 8-12, and we set out our placemats and fancy dishes. The RSVPs would fluctuate as the day unfolded, as one person wondered if they could bring a guest, and someone else's babysitter canceled. More often than not, there was an extra place setting at the table.
I heard myself say, "My mother would say, 'That one's for Jesus'." As in, it's not a mistake, let's invite god to sit at the table with us.
And yet, I'm quite confident she never said this. I don't know why I've attributed it to her.
She was raised essentially Jewish, and in my household of origin, we never had fluctuating numbers of guests.
(I like the idea of it anyway.)
Jesus doesn't have much of a role in my life, but this is when I think of him: when there is an extra seat at the table. In the ideology of my ideal mother, an archetype that melts as I age and realize how much better she is and was than anything my little mind could have wished for.
And so I suppose this is one of the reasons I miss sitting at the table. Not the ceremony of setting it, but the sense of welcoming and abundance. The idea of dining with the important people.
And making space for god, as she is.
The magic that threads our wishing and our remarkable reality into something that feels like home.
Or something like it.