Gather Round My Table

As holidays go, I like New Year’s Day.  New Year’s Eve is low key for us – being non-drinkers eliminates about 95% of most New Year ’s Eve festivities, so it’s usually just games and snacks and one determined child trying to last until midnight.  I’ve never liked the idea of making “resolutions” but I’m a big “planner” so I make plans.  (I know – semantics.  But I like plans!)

 

Still, I like the idea of celebrating a New Year.  There’s something hopeful about it, and I consider the fact that I’m still hopeful one of my best traits. (See May 1, 2009 entry for journal post on "hope" at the link).  Whatever the last year may have dropped, slopped and splashed on your doorstep, there’s something cleansing about anticipating the New Year and naively hoping it will be better than the last.  

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s  “Thanksgiving Song” has a stanza that says,

 “Grateful for each hand we hold ,

  Gathered round this table,

  From far and near we travel home,

Pretty Dining Room for company...

  Blessed that we are able.”

While I have a lovely formal dining room with a table that seats 10, we inevitably gather around our not-as-big, not-as-formal breakfast room table.  It’s made of iron with a glass top and we bought it primarily because we figured our kids would have a hard time destroying it.  It’s held up great, but more importantly, it’s held our friends and family.

Kitchen table - where the "Gathering" takes place

Last month when I graduated from college, I sat at that table with friends and family, including my baby brother who had never been to my home in Atlanta.  He doesn’t like the “traveling far” part of “from far and near” but he made an exception for me and I was so thrilled to have him gathered round my table.  

We gathered round that table at Thanksgiving with my older brother and his wife and children – two young boys who brought life and happiness to the “kid’s table” when it seems like my kids aren’t really “kids” anymore.  

Eli sits at that table every day with the help of his aide Mykeshia, a woman who loves him like her own.  She literally holds his hand (and sometimes arms and legs) while he struggles to sit up straight and not fall over.  She holds him in place and encourages him to last just a little bit longer – and he does, because he is so thrilled to be sitting in a regular chair at the regular table… because he too knows that’s where everything happens.  

We’ve gathered round this table for Sunday dinner nearly every week – countless pans of Chicken Pot Pie, meat loaf and mashed potatoes, and blueberry-peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream.  We gathered for the food, but often stayed to talk and laugh with friends.

We’ve gathered there to play Canasta, board games, Mexican Train Dominoes, and endless, infinite, countless games of Uno with Eli.

I’ve read a thousand books there, propped against the napkin basket so I could read and eat at the same time.   

Even though there are at least five desks in our home, Hudson invariably spreads out his homework there, so he can have company and not be lonely.

Friends have pulled up a chair and talked and cried with me.   Children have sassed me there, between asking me if their friends could stay for dinner and complaining “you never fix anything I like!”  

My children’s friends have sat there through the years; once loud, sweaty, clumsy children prone to spilling soda and making messes; now mature young adults stopping by to drop off wedding invitations.  

I have three tablecloths for the glass top – plum, gold and green, and every week the dirty, crumb-laden, stained one gets whisked off and thrown in the wash while a fresh, crisp, clean one slides on, ready for more friends and family to gather round.

If you stop by my house for a few minutes, I’ll often sit down with you in the formal dining room to chat briefly.  But if you’re my friend and you’re going to stay awhile, I’ll bring you on back to the kitchen to “gather round my table.”  

I hope the New Year finds you happy and “blessed that you are able” to do all you want to do.