2002-07-29 - 9:08 p.m.
This month's Sun magazine was in the mailbox when I ran home for lunch today. It is the one magazine of which I read every word: an ad free voice of compassion and humanity somehow managing to stay afloat in the slick world of publishing. Every month readers contribute short pieces on a given subject. This month's topic is: The Kitchen Table. I was wishing I had made a contribution, so I decided to write one here:
My mother raised us around the kitchen table. We lived in country houses where the big kitchens were always the center of activity. Of course there were tense evening meals with Dad at the head of the table, barking out commands, complaining about the food, criticizing everyone's eating habits. But that is not what I remember when I think of our kitchen table. My three siblings and I just tried to get through meals without attracting his attention, and then he would be off and gone again. When he wasn't working at his job, he was working on the farm, and when he wasn't doing that he was hunting or fishing. He would blow in like an ill wind, get mad, and blow out again, leaving mother and her four children to create a world of their own. Mostly, I remember the five of us around that kitchen table.
There were infinite numbers of drawing and coloring and homework sessions, of course. We had bedrooms, but we always wanted to drag everything out and sit around the table to work on it. We cut paperdolls from the Sears & Robuck catalog, and staged their elaborate dramas across the formica. Mother made Play-doh from salt and flour, and sometimes even homemade fingerpaint or papier mache would be concocted on a snowy Saturday. I don't know many mothers willing to allow four kids to rip a huge stack of newspapers into buckets of wall paper paste and attempt to construct a giant giraffe with the resulting glop. At the kitchen table. But she did. I think she figured out that when we were busy making a mess we weren't fighting, and she preferred the mess. I'm sure it bothered her that we didn't have much to work with, but she never let us know that. From her we learned there was no excuse for not being resourceful.
She taught us to play card games, sitting around the kitchen table, she and I bending the rules for the younger kids. We talked her into chinese checkers and board games sometimes, or spread out a jigsaw puzzle that we all worked on.
But the most memorable times were those when we just sat around the table with pencil and paper, and talked. When Peanuts was popular, we all wrote down our own personal versions of "Happiness is..." and "Misery is...." We wrote our own stories and read them aloud. We played word games like "Mad Libs" and the dictionary game and "Goin Out West." We learned to say "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "pithecanthropus erectus". We figured out how old we would all be in the year 2000 and made predictions about what the world would be like. We had contests to see who could write down the names of all fifty states first. We wrote letters, both real and imaginary.
It was during these years that my mother decided to go back to college. She had four kids at home, an unsympathetic husband, only one quarter of prior credit earned before her marriage, and miles of rough road (both literally and figuratively) between her and the state university. But she had a goal: a degree in English. And so Mother joined us with her homework at the kitchen table, although it was common to hear her typing her papers on her ancient manual typewriter, long after we were in bed. As we got older she shared things from her coursework with us. I was in my teens by this time and began reading many of the books she was reading for her English literature classes: Kafka, Hardy, Dostoyevsky. She taught us logic problems when she took Straight Thinking, and brought home reproductions of famous paintings when she took The Arts and Man. When she took a watercolor class, we all got out our watercolor paints, and painted, too. She graduated and eventually earned a Master's degree, also.
I don't mean to write some "poor-but-happy-five-little-peppers"saga here. We were far from perfect kids. At the time we would rather have gone into town to the movies than play games at the kitchen table, given the choice. We fought, and got bored, and got into mischief. And our mother was overworked and underhappy for most of her married life, often just trying to keep the peace. I think she looks back and regrets that we didn't have more advantages.
But she gave us more than any of us understood at the time. From the perspective of maturity, I realize that while I didn't have many of the things I wanted growing up, some of the things I did receive were of immeasurable value. Our Mother encouraged our interest in words and ideas, took delight in our creativity. All of us graduated from college, two with advanced degrees. We all supported ourselves and paid for our own educations. And we still love to sit around a table and talk to each other. Mother once said to us, "The best thing I ever gave you was each other." But there were many other things, too. Like sitting around the kitchen table.
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