A place at the table
The old dining room table, round with faded wood laminate, sits in my parents’ garage. The chairs capped with green vinyl cushions crack with time and the weight of thousands of family mealtimes.
For some reason, my parents can’t seem to let the table go. Sure, it’s been replaced by a gleaming and newer model in a cream-colored wood, but the history surrounding that old dinette set is too priceless for departure or relegation to the Goodwill.
Sunday dinners served while growing up in my small hometown of LaGrange, Ga., are the meals I remember most. Mama would wake us for church, proclaiming she couldn’t go because all of her L’eggs pantyhose had runs in them. And besides, who would cook the pot roast or fry the chicken golden brown the way Granny did when she was alive if Mama went to preaching?
We’d come home from the sermon, my sister and I, and take our places around the table, the avocado-colored chairs matching all the kitchen appliances, the color du jour circa the 1970s.
Smells of fried onions and that delicious aroma of burning flour crisps permeated the house. I can still hear the ice cubes tinkling as Mama poured the sweet tea and set the glasses to the right of our plates.
“Let’s all hold hands now and say the blessing,” she’d say, and we’d reach out to one another and thank God for the food, asking him to nourish it to the good of our bodies.
Having a family of four, a circular table seemed a metaphor for the family’s cohesion and devotion. During weeknights, Daddy would come home from his job as an industrial engineer, and Mom always had something ready for supper within an hour or so, after he’d sipped a stiff Maker’s Mark over water and ice.
I remember the meals as a clockwork pattern of regularity. Spaghetti on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, tuna casserole on Thursdays and the nights of frozen Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, which seemed a huge treat along with the Swanson Pot Pies we’d eat if my parents were going out dancing and hired a sitter.
My mother, back then, wasn’t a great cook. But she did know the importance of sitting her family down at night, the four of us together for the evening meal. Rarely did we go out, save for Wednesdays, the weeknight Mama stowed away her pots and pans, and we ordered the hamburger steak special at the Moose Lodge and played bingo.
Fast forward about 35 years and step into my mother’s renovated kitchen in Spartanburg, S.C., where she and Dad moved after my sister and I went off to college. Despite the changes, she and my dad continue the tradition of sitting together every evening meal, never going out. Mama has grown from a new bride who didn’t even know how to make a “tossed” salad. These days she’s a good enough cook to delight Dad who sits in his leather recliner, Fox News blaring, bourbon and water by his side, waiting to be called to supper.
Mama typically starts the meal with a large bowl of in-season fruit, a salad made colorful with spinach and spring greens, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and a selection of dressings we never dreamed of back in our Moose Club days. What I love most when I go home to visit, besides feeling the calluses of my father’s palms as we say our blessings, is the audible pleasure Dad emits with nearly every bite.
And this brings me full circle, like that old dining room table, to my own cooking and the regrets I have as a mother. On the nights I’d cook, the D my mother made in home-economics almost proved hereditary. I could toss a roast in the Crock Pot, make spaghetti and other pasta dishes, but never learned to fry chicken. Since I worked full-time, we often ate out. The Piccadilly in the Asheville Mall or trips to Frank’s Roman Pizza were our go-to solutions on hectic weeknights.
Most nights now it’s just my teenage daughter, her iPhone, and me, sitting at the bar in my kitchen. “Dear, God, thank you for this food, and please bless all the hungry people in the world so they don’t have to go without,” she says. While we don’t hold hands, or sit at my own rickety and round dining room table, this is good enough for me.