Mother and her Table

TALKING TO MYSELF: 17 Dec 2011  Christmastime, new and fresh in my heart each year, is also a season of memories.  I spring from a family of storytellers - repetitious storytellers my children would say -- and every December until her death in late 2006, my mother told us about her excitement at purchasing her dining room table for Christmas in 1949. I wrote this story about the table - about her -- a few years before her death as she lay in the hospital with a broken arm and a leg that would not move. She loved my telling the story in the newspaper, but if she noticed the metaphor, she didn't comment on it. When we emptied her apartment after her death, we were all reluctant to part with her beloved dining room furniture although none of us had room for it. Ernie spoke up for the buffet piece and uses it now in his office to hold the computer printer and paper. I transformed the china cabinet into a linen press for a bathroom, a clever solution to two problems, I thought. And daughter Becky, bless her, spoke up for the table. Her old table, never grand she allowed, could be shuffled off somewhere else, and replaced by Grandmom's. And so, I had it repaired and refinished for her, and it serves on with a modest degree of elegance in her pretty new Lexington house. I know Mother would be delighted were she here to see it -- and that she would tell this old story one more time.

 My Mother and Her Dining Room Table

          “Daddy and I bought it the first Christmas after the house burned, when we sold the tobacco.  And I’ll never forget Aunt Bessie’s reaction when she came for Christmas dinner.  ‘Why, I had no idea you’d get such a nice one!’”

          Here my mother always pauses, smiling at the memory of the old aunt’s famous bluntness.  But I hear the pride in her voice too, the flush of a long-ago coup, remembered. 

          Nearly every December that I can recall, my mother has remarked on the anniversary of this event.  We are a people who rhythmically retell the stories of our past, knowing that the meaning of our lives is buried in the mundane, that the majesty of the myth lies in the repetition.  Neither of us finds it necessary to note that this Christmas finds her in the hospital nursing limbs that stubbornly will not move.

          To understand the triumph of my mother’s dining room table, you must first understand the tragedy.  In the spring of 1949, the big, imposing farmhouse, that had been our family home for two generations, burned to the ground.   An explosion – electrical we always presumed – burst upon us in the middle of the night.  We escaped with our lives and our nightclothes. 

          Like most survivors, my family was grateful at first, and then – though they knew it did not become them – somewhat resentful.  The modest frame house that could be built with inflated post-war dollars would never equal the quiet elegance of the old one, the house that had been a symbol of my grandfather’s success.  And the furniture that was quickly assembled “to set up housekeeping” again was inexpensive and functional – a Formica and chrome dinette set for the kitchen, a sofa upholstered for practicality in the newly invented plastic . 

          But even in adversity, we are a people who entertain grand notions.  My grandmother, married at seventeen and shackled ever afterward to a Kentucky tobacco farm, always said it wouldn’t faze her a bit to dine with the President of the United States.  And with her charm and  intelligence, everyone knew she told the truth.  Years after her death, when President Jimmy Carter was dropping in for dinner on common folks, I almost sent him an invitation on her behalf, in absentia so to speak – but I digress.  The point is, my mother needed a table, worthy of entertaining the President, should he drop by.

          And so, when the crop was sold in December, a gleaming mahogany table, an 18th century look-a-like with little brass feet, arrived at our house.  With its eight Chippendale chairs, it left only a narrow pathway for walking in our small dining room.  We considered that scant inconvenience compared to the service it gave.  No one famous ever came to dinner, of course, but lots of other folks did, and the talk around the table was merry and sad and profound.

          For years, my mother kept its surface shining with hand-applied paste wax.  And it was my early housekeeping duty to dust the table every day, especially the grooved legs, two sets of three, that curved gracefully upward until they merged into matching wooden pineapples.  But despite our care, the table’s finish became scratched with use, and my mother tried to cover the blemishes with Old English Scratch Remover.  Then mysterious white spots showed up on its surface; we were panicked until someone told us how to use mayonnaise to restore its dark luster.  One set of the table’s legs broke, and could not be repaired.   Ever after we moved the table carefully and tried not to lean on it.  Finally, its gleaming finish succumbed to time, and became riddled with thousands of tiny cracks; we covered it with a lace tablecloth and kept on using it.

          But on this cold December anniversary, neither of us finds it necessary to note that the table is any different than it was in its prime.  It endures, and that is what matters to us.

Copyright Georgia Green Stamper

This essay was first published in The News-Herald and is included in an anthology of Stamper's essays _YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE from the crossroads of the world_ (Wind 2008.)