Illustration by Victoria Borges
A large part of my work as a furniture maker has been constructing tables: kitchen tables, dining room tables, tables around which memories are undoubtedly made and family lore is written.
The storytelling tradition began early in my family. As I grew, it was not unusual for my father, a doctor, to get a call at breakfast. Sitting around the table, we would listen to his end of the conversation. “So, was it more like oatmeal or heavy cream?” we heard him ask. My sister and I squirmed with delight, demanding a full explanation as soon as he got off the phone.
At dinner, the question “How was your day?” usually brought interesting results: an appendix removed just in time, with details about its location and appearance, or something about a sigmoidoscopy. If not much happened that day, my sister and I had a backlog of stories we would beg to hear recounted: the bug stuck in an ear, the tapeworm lured up a man’s throat by a bowl of warm milk held in front of his open mouth, and, our favorite, the food fight that broke out in anatomy class when our father was in medical school, during which a body part flew out an open window, landing on a downtown Baltimore sidewalk.
Such is my frame of reference when it comes to dinner table conversation. Polite isn’t necessarily a prerequisite; captivating is. Vivid details are like seasonings in the meal; they make the lasting impression. So, it did not seem out of line to tell a story about Herbert the donkey when I brought my soon-to-be-wife, Susan, to my parents’ house for dinner to meet the whole family. Herbert was given to us by a patient of my father’s when I was 6, and he lived in the backyard of our suburban home.
We sat around the table, with Susan on my father’s right and me at the other end next to my mother, grown family members in between. Everybody was asking polite questions, making niceties, trying to make good impressions on one another. I turned to my mother to ask, “Do you remember the time when I was little and I saw Herbert standing in the backyard with something enormous hanging down from his stomach?”
Her look said, “Stop talking right now.” But since I had everyone’s attention, I continued.
“I was perched on the sofa looking out the back window and yelled, ‘Mom, come quick. Herbert’s stomach has busted open. His insides are coming out!’ You ran into the room, took one look, told me it was nothing, and walked out. ‘That is not nothing,’ I called out as you left the room.”
In the moment, my mother steadfastly denied any recollection of this story and tried in vain to change the subject while the men around the table wanted more details. Susan, wisely, did not say a word — but later made me retell the story when she took me to meet her family. After dinner, Susan and the other women found themselves alone in the kitchen, and my mother confided that Herbert would have similar romantic awakenings during her bridge parties on the back terrace.
These stories — the laughter, the absurdity, the mischief — they are the sacraments, and the tables where they’re told are my altars. The telling and the retelling of such stories are the rituals that connect us. When we laugh together over a meal — whether we’re children eating breakfast, or women in elegant dresses at card tables enjoying cucumber sandwiches and drinking tea from fine china while a donkey looks on with lust — we’re joined in communal moments of wonder.
