The Kitchen Table of My Childhood

The Kitchen Table of My Childhood

The kitchen table of my childhood had a smooth, white Formica top with gold dots and wormy streaks,

edges faced with a ridged strip of steel and supported by narrowing tubular legs of shiny steel.

I didn’t take notice of the table as a child but as I entered my teenage years I developed a teenage aesthetic and thought it ugly and wished we had a pretty wood dining table like in the homes of my friends whose homes were larger and some had dining rooms.

But now in midlife my aesthetic has changed and when I see a table similar to the one of my childhood, I am nostalgically swept back to my childhood and I remember other things about the table. At the age of five when I got home from the half day of kindergarten, my mother would serve me either a bologna sandwich or peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sometimes soup for lunch at that table.  I was hungry by the time I got off the school bus from what I, as a five year old thought was a long bus ride and it tasted good and was comforting.

At the kitchen table of my childhood in my mind’s eye I see my brother and sisters sitting down for supper after school. Each day at the table, my mother asked us how our day went. My brother’s face would light up and his eyes would twinkle. Then he would share some mischievous event like the time he dragged a set of tire chains down the second floor hallway right in front of the assistant principal.  The principle asked him why he was dragging those tire chains down the hall and my brother (pausing to add suspense to his story) answered, “Well it’s easier than pushing them.”  Then he would throw back his head in laughter! 

Other images flood into my mind and I see Santa sitting at the kitchen table (it was really Peter, one of the older neighborhood kids visiting the younger kids in the neighborhood) picking up one of my younger sisters and carefully placing her on his knee.  He asked her if she had been a good girl this year and she looked at him wide-eyed and in awe but she didn’t answer him as she was really shy.

At the kitchen table of my childhood, I remember my bus driver sitting half-way slumped over the table.  My mother tended to him after he showed up at the door with a bloody nose and drunk after he hit my brother’s friend’s car parked on the side of the road in the front of our house, knocking the car upside down into our front yard.  My mother took from him the mostly empty whiskey bottle, called the police, cleaned his face of the blood, and made him some stout hot coffee in order to sober him up as much as she could before the police arrived. (He would have lost his job as bus driver if he got a DWI.)

I remember the Saturday evening meals with family friends.  It was the same family each Saturday. They had six children and mom would cook a huge meal for them.  The children would eat ravenously and then run from the table and play with me and my younger sisters making a terrible mess of the entire house.  The adults would stay in the kitchen, clear the table and play cards often until the wee hours of the morning.  The children would fall asleep on the living floor usually around ten o’clock.  It wasn’t until I was older did my mom share with me that the nights they came to supper was often the only decent meal they had all week because their dad was a chiropractor and back then not many folks would go to chiropractors because they were yet accepted as legitimate physicians.  He often couldn’t make enough money to keep enough food on the table for such a large family.

The kitchen table of my childhood was where I learned to sew.  At first, I learned to sew simple garments and with each garment completed, my mother would give me more complex sewing projects to complete.  As I tried putting in my first zipper (and ripping it out three times) I became frustrated when on the fourth try once again the sewing line wavered.  My father who was cooking a steak for a late supper after fishing that evening, walked over and tried to tell me how to do it.  I had never seen him sew anything my entire life and I snapped at him for the first time in my life.  He looked at me surprised (my sisters and brother never talked back to him), took a drink of his beer, turned around and went back to the stove to check on his steak. He didn’t say another word on the subject.  I counted myself lucky he did not react to my snapping at him.

One of my favorite memories of a common scene at the kitchen table was when a couple of the neighborhood moms  would come over in the afternoons to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes (it was the only time I saw my mom smoke), and talk about everything under the sun.  No topic was prohibited. One of those neighborhood chats took place late one afternoon and my mom and the neighbors were discussing all kinds of topics including reincarnation.  I had to practice my shorthand for my high school shorthand class and had to write several pages of shorthand from a conversation or TV show.  My mom and neighbors were so animated in their discussion about reincarnation that I decided to write down in shorthand what they said.  When I turned it in to my shorthand teacher, I watched her read the homework assignments as we were completed an in-class activity.  She got to my assignment, started reading it and as she read, her expression changed from bored to curious to one of wide-eyed surprise. She looked over at me, was startled to see I was watching her and quickly looked away.  She never did say a word to me about what I wrote.

As I thought about all those experiences at the kitchen table of my childhood, I realized the importance of that spot in the family home. I experienced and observed family bonding, care and compassion, childhood awe, creativity and growth, as well as friendship and community.  That table may have not appealed to my sense of aesthetics, but it helped to shape and mold me, my family, friends, and community. I hope that at the kitchen table of my children’s lives, they had the same type of growing and molding experiences. What did you learn from your experiences at the kitchen (or dining room) table of your childhood?