The Kitchen Table
It wasn't a large table. It measured about forty inches by twenty-seven. It was painted white and stood firmly on four wooden legs and had a drawer in one of the long sides that held the everyday cutlery with a brass handle like the ones you find on file cabinets. My father had made dividers in the drawer to keep the various utensils separated: spoons, knives, forks and soup spoons each with their own niche. The table's most impressive feature was its white baked-on enamel top. Every year, about two weeks before Passover, my father would place old newspapers under the legs and diligently sand the wood, removing all traces of old paint. He would then apply a shiny new coat to the legs and frame. I always likened the process to the burning of the chametz-all the bread and toast crumbs which might have become embedded in the wood during the past year were now safely removed.
For the first twenty-five years of my life, almost every rite of passage, every pertinent phase of my growing up could be associated with that kitchen table. As an infant, it was on that kitchen table, covered with a fluffy towel, that my mother dried me and dressed me after I had been bathed in the large, single kitchen sink, as our bathroom had no heat, keeping me warm and cozy with the heat from the nearby oven. Later as I grew older, I was rushed from the tub in the bathroom to the oven-warmed kitchen and there in a chair by the table I was dried and made ready for bed. At that table I received my milk and cookies and then my mother or father read me a bedtime story.
We ate most of our meals at the kitchen table, my parents at the ends, supervising and my brother and I seated along the sides. And when we were only four for Shabbat, we ate there too, my mother and I lighting the Shabbat candles, the enamel top dressed in a white tablecloth adorned with the good flatware which my mother kept safely in her bedroom, tucked in the bottom dresser drawer in its own special chest. How privileged I was to fetch it and take the allocated pieces from their velvet holders. How I loved opening my mother's drawer where she kept the case, the mingled scent of her clean, fresh lingerie that shared the drawer with the velvet box hitting my nose.
The kitchen table served its ceremonious duties as well as the mundane. It was the place where my brother and I did our homework every school night, each sitting at one of the narrow ends so that we had room for all of our books. My mother, always there in the kitchen with us, sewing, darning or preparing tomorrow's meal, available for questions and help. After our homework was finished, if time permitted, my brother and I played Parcheesi or checkers. And there we learned to play Casino under our mother's perfect tutelage-how I coveted that precious ten of diamonds!
The kitchen table was a place where my mother and I had girl-talks, where I could confide to her my daily mishaps and adventures and hear of hers as she had grown up. When I was in college, we had our own book club sharing history and romance, adventure and mystery. For a time, we met each morning at our kitchen table for coffee and together read Gone With The Wind, pledging never to read without the other. The kitchen table, if it could talk, could tell the story of my life. It shared our secrets, disappointments and successes like a quiet counselor. It was there that I told my mother how I met my future husband and again another conversation when he proposed marriage seven months later.
Twenty-five years after my birth, when I left my parent's house, I left not only my family, but my prized kitchen table. Years later, when my mother packed up her home and came to live with me, she told me she had disposed of her things in a good and suitable way. I could not bear to ask her what had happened to the kitchen table. I was afraid to hear the answer.
But In 1980, I got the answer to my unspoken question. I had the occasion to visit my oldest son and his family in Waltham, Massachusetts. My daughter-in-law, Martha, was working for the American Jewish Historical Society which presented a wonderful exhibit called On Common Ground, The Boston Jewish Experience 1649-1980. How proud I was that Martha's name was listed on the very first panel of the exhibit as Research Coordinator. The exhibit went on tour in many cities of the United States, including a run at the Statue of Liberty in New York. I received my own personal tour of the exhibit and enjoyed passing through the different panoramas of Jewish life of each of the periods, when all of a sudden, I stopped, stunned and excited at the same time as I saw before me, The Sabbath Kitchen circa 1920's. There in the middle of the display was my kitchen table! With a lump in my throat, I asked Martha, "Where did you find my kitchen table?" And she answered me with a smile, "Bess, you know yours wasn't the only kitchen table like that." I knew in my mind she was right, but I also knew in my heart, she was wrong because my kitchen table was a unique icon embedded with a retrospective of my life, a guardian of my memories, there was no other anywhere else quite like it.