Your dinner table memories

It happened some thirty years ago, but I still remember Tony’s question.

He had come from out of town to visit our daughter during their college Christmas break.

After two or three days, he took my husband, Dave, aside. “Does your family always eat meals together?”

Dave assured him we did, but he was struck by Tony’s strange question.

Tony must have picked up on Dave’s bafflement so he explained, “I’ve never eaten dinner with my family. At my house, when we’re hungry we look in the fridge and eat whatever we can find.”

Both Dave and I were shocked—we’d never heard of such a thing—and we were sad to think of all Tony and his family missed by opting out of meals together.

I thought of Tony when I read these words penned by Henri Nouwen in 1997:

“Today fast-food services and TV dinners

have made common meals less and less central.

But what will there be to remember

when we no longer come together around the table

to share a meal? . . . 

Can we make the table a hospitable place,

inviting us to kindness, gentleness, joy,

and peace and creating beautiful memories?”

(from “Creating Beautiful Memories,” Bread for the Journey, 

February 18 selection)

Did your family eat meals together around the table when you were growing up? When you were raising your kids?

Around the dinner table in Kenya, we became friends-like-family
with John, then later enjoyed a meal with him on the Thames.

If so, you’ll enjoy—and maybe even applaud—the following Henri Nouwen thoughts:

“. . . Having a meal is more than eating and drinking. It is celebrating the gifts of life we share. A meal together is one of the most intimate and sacred human events. Around the table we become vulnerable, filling one another’s plates and cups and encouraging one another to eat and drink. Much more happens at a meal than satisfying hunger and quenching thirst. Around the table we become family, friends, community, yes, a body” (from “The Meal that Makes us Family and Friends,” Bread for the Journey, February 15 selection).

My daughter's fourth birthday

Jo Harjo also wrote about a dinner table: “. . . The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So has it been since creation, and will go on. . . . At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. . . . Wars have begun and ended at this table. . .” (excerpts from “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems).

She’s right. Sometimes dinner tables resemble war zones.

Henri Nouwen writes about that, too—about husbands and wives refusing to speak to each other, siblings bickering, and awkward silences. He says, “Let’s do everything possible to make the table a place to celebrate intimacy” (“The Barometer of Our Lives,” Bread for the Journey, February 17 selection).

 

My in-laws' 70th wedding anniversary

Consider including in your memoir a story about a dinner table—and the life-shaping experiences you had around it.

Give yourself a day or so to think back.

Maybe you’ll come up with a story set at your childhood dinner table,

or at your grandparents’ dinner table.

Or perhaps you’ll write a story that took place at a cold industrial table in a hospital cafeteria,

or with strangers along a plastic counter at a fast-food place in the Rome airport,

or deep in an African jungle,

or on foreign soil in an Army mess tent.

Look again at Jo Harjos’swords:

“Wars have begun and ended at this table. . . .”

If your dinnertime resembled a battlefield,

write stories to inspire an about-face

in the way your readers do their meals.

Your story could provide motivation

to break the cycle, end the war,

and create a happy, healthy, affirming experience

around the dinner table.

Your story could be the turning point

so that in the future,

people will have pleasant memories

to pass on to their kids and grandkids.

Be sure to come back next Tuesday.

I’ll tell you a story

about a very special table

that’s been in our family for four generations, and counting. . . .