Ode to a Kitchen Table

A friend of mine who is a priest in Los Angeles posed a question on Facebook the other day.  He asked what object represented intimacy, not sexual intimacy, but the intimacy that comes from being in relationship with someone for a long time.  He was working on a sermon about something that I didn't pay attention to, but the question struck me.

And I immediately knew what my answer was.  The object that represents relational intimacy to me most is a kitchen table.  Certainly some specific kitchen tables, including my own, but also the kitchen table of history and of life.

First night of semester exams

We never hung out at the kitchen table much when I was growing up -- the breakfast room was back in a corner of the house, there wasn't much going on in the kitchen in the first place, and the dining room table was reserved only for holiday dinners, when my grandparents came to town, and the mail.  But in my house, the kitchen table is the center of all things.  It may be because I don't allow food upstairs.  It may be because I don't allow television during the week or the computer is down here or there's a comfy couch nearby for reading.  It may be because our kitchen table is where everybody is together most of the time.  It may be because my children can't go ten feet inside a door without dropping their shit everywhere and that's the closest place.  Who's to say?

But for whatever the reason, everything gets done at the kitchen table.  Eating, talking, crafts, projects, and homework, lots and lots of homework over the years.  And it makes me happy.  G has a desk in her room and does her fair share of cocooning, but usually only on the weekends.  S has never had a desk and when asked if she wanted a cool piece of furniture to use as a pull-down desk, she said she'd never use it because she always does her homework downstairs.

The table is where our family is a family.  And although T is gone most of the week, what I find deeply moving is that his place is always laid with a napkin (when there are any) and his place is always cleared.  The kids usually don't dump their books and papers there.  They'll dump their stuff on my place, but I'm around to clean it up.  Daddy's place is sacred.  I love that.  It's like the empty chair for Elijah at a Jewish Seder.  Keeping his place means he's always with us, even when he's away.

And I deeply love this table, too.  I especially love it when no one is here.  It's cleaned off and the napkins (when there are any) are folded.  And there are several more hours that it will stay that way because no one is here.  It is a place of infinite possibility:  newspaper reading, emailing, writing, reading, coffee drinking making to-do lists and including things you've already done so you can cross them off.  Wait.  What?

Kids' first day back to school a/k/a hooray!

And I love other people's kitchen tables, too.  My stuffy Florida grandmother's kitchen table had a butter dish that you were forbidden to get crumbs into - hello, butter knife!  But I can still smell the heavy scent of my grandfather's dark rye bread on all those summer mornings.  My mother-in-law's kitchen table has seen any number of looooong family gatherings - we are outgrowing her small apartment now that our kids have become adult-sized, but that table carries so many wonderful memories.  And it will continue to.

My best friend's kitchen table is a huge round, but we always sat right next to each other and drank coffee on those endless mornings when our kids were little and sucking the souls out of us.  We drank coffee and talked about what we would do and where we would go when we didn't have toddlers.  New York!  Paris!  New Orleans!  Who cares?!  And now, we don't have toddlers anymore.  And our oldest ones are starting to figure out their college choices.  But the table that was once a life raft may well be again, for a different reason.

And that's okay.

I think.

I Am A Bad-ass

Ghastly IPhone lighting, but still.
Impressive, right?

So, early last week, I made a cake.  From scratch.  As in flour, butter, eggs, the whole shebang.  And it was awesome.  Cream cheese buttercream.  Lemon curd filling (more on that later).  Almonds on the side to cover up the really hideous frosting job. And it was awesome.  Not everyone liked the cream cheese frosting.  Not everyone liked the lemon curd.  Not everyone had a leftover piece at lunch and at dinner for three days.  What?

And then later last week, T and I finally made the leap into the cash-only-everything-accounted-for-beans-and-rice-hard-core-like-when-we-lived-in-an-Airstream-trailer-because-we-had-no-money budget process that we like to call getting ready to pay for college.  And let me tell you that every $18 purchase you ever made because it was only $18 makes you feel really, really stupid.  It is amazing how much money I was spending on absolutely nothing.  They were nothings that I thought I really wanted/needed, but they were nothings nonetheless.  So, in less than a week, I have become an obsessive, miserly shrew. "No, you can't have new Vans, we don't get clothing money until November 9." "Okay, I've bought five bags of candy for Halloween, but we're only opening them one at a time.  I need the $7.50 if we can return the ones we don't use."  I'm not wearing this at all well.  Financial discipline is not my color.

But the short of this long story is that the budget COMBINED with this project is turning me into some kind of Depression era loony, as if the massive amount of canned goods in my pantry weren't enough evidence.  The cake recipe called for 5 eggs -- one whole and four whites.  Now, I buy the organic eggs from chickens with beaks and access to sunshine.  It's important to me, not as much to others.  I don't judge.  I merely point this out because those eggs are almost $5 a dozen, which translates to roughly 41 cents per egg.  Which means that for the four eggs that I'm only using the whites for is a waste of 82 cents, if you assume that the white is half the egg.  And 82 cents is almost a refill of a Diet Coke at the Sac-N-Pac.  I just couldn't let that kind of waste happen.  It is also possible that I desperately need a job.

So, unlike Washington, I took steps to achieve full utilization.  I made lemon curd.  And no ordinary lemon curd, either.  I made Martha Stewart's lemon curd.  Now, this link isn't the exact recipe in the original bible that is the 1995 Martha Stewart Cookbook (don't hate), but it's close.  And if I were better at math, I could actually verify that it's the same recipe increased by a third.  Potato, potato-ah.  It was good.  Dangerously good.  Heart-attack good.

And this isn't even why I am a bad-ass.  Can you believe it?  All of above was performed in the line of duty as part of my job as amazing, freaky, wheat bread and granola, no-baggies, composting mom.  It doesn't even count.

I am a bad-ass because I discovered today that if you stir one little teaspoon of lemon curd into your low fat Greek yogurt, which you don't even like but are required to eat because you get no dairy and therefore no calcium and because you need the protein, it transforms said yogurt into a culinary masterpiece of untold delight.  And I have convinced myself that such a little tiny bit of cholesterol-laden, sweetened fat droplets is totally okay.

If I'm wrong, I don't want to be right.