Kitchen Table and Dining Room Table

As we wander around buildings and construction and tools and houses, I think back to my childhood home, and the tables where we ate.

In the house of my childhood we ate breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table and dinner at the dining room table.

The kitchen table was at the sunny east end of the yellow room, with windows looking over my mother’s roses along the driveway.  The table was  sturdy, a pine half circle built into the wall, with sort of modern plastic molded chairs.  Between meals I liked to sit on top of the table as well as at the table, drawing, feeding my fish, talking to my mother while she cooked.  The only radio in the house was at that table (until I became a teenager and got one in my room to listen to the Beatles.)  I was sitting at that table eating a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch one November Friday afternoon (we got out of school early on Fridays) when we heard about Kennedy’s assassination.

Every night at 6:30 we had dinner together in the dining room around a family heirloom walnut table with silver candlesticks. The room’s bare walls were white, and there was a nice oriental carpet, from the same ancestor as the table, I think.  The kitchen floor was linoleum but the dining room was hardwood.  We had to dress nicely for dinner and take part in conversation, usually led by my father.  He had grown up in a very formal household, and insisted we use our knife and fork correctly.  We were not allowed to pick up our food in our hands (I never ate fried chicken until I went to college) or make a mush of our peas and mashed potatoes.  (If we begged we were allowed to go out onto the front porch in the summer and mush up our ice cream, but not at table.)  We waited for everyone to be finished and then asked to be excused.  My mother would serve the vegetables and starch at her end, then pass the plate to my father who would place the meat on it.  I was served last, as the youngest.  We each had our own plates, in a series on American Trains and they were stacked in the right order.  Mine was “Best Friend of Charleston.”  (The first American steam locomotive, 1830, but you knew that.  I was a little spoiled, as the youngest, and figured I really was the best friend.  My brother’s train plate was “Man o’ War.”)

In retrospect this seems antiquated and rigid, but it seemed normal to me.  Sometimes we went to my grandmother’s an hour away for Sunday dinner and that was really formal, with servants and finger bowls.  So our dinner table didn’t seem that extreme.  I did notice when I went to college that no one used their knife and fork as precisely as I did. 

With my own kids I tried to have family dinners several times a week, to carry on the practice of shared conversation at a slow pace and some basic table manners.  I never pushed the upper class knife and fork routine, nor did we have a dress code.  But we copied my parents in having candles we lit to mark the beginning of the meal and ritually blew out at the end.  And we do each have favorite forks and plates.  My husband the carpenter made both our dining room table, from thick walnut slabs milled in our woods, and the smaller plywood and pine table attached to the kitchen wall.  Same wood as the two tables in my childhood home.  We think we are different from our parents, but maybe not so much.

I wrote earlier this summer about visiting the house in Akron of AA co-founder Dr. Bob and had these pictures.  His kitchen table, where he and Bill W. first met and helped each other stay sober, with coffee made by their wives.   In a recent Grapevine, the AA newsletter, someone wrote, “Alcoholics Anonymous was nurtured in its early days around a kitchen table ... True, we have progressed materially to better furniture and more comfortable surroundings. Yet the kitchen table must ever be appropriate for us. It is the perfect symbol of simplicity.”

The dining room table in Dr. Bob’s house, like my childhood house,  was more formal, less used.  But it did have on it the typewriter that his daughter used to type the first draft of the Big Book and I think the docent said she worked at that very table.  The only work I can remember being done on our dining room table was laying out patterns for sewing, the thin pattern paper that my mother would pin to the fabric.  But the sewing machine was in another room.  The fancy old dining room table was really only for eating and talking.   While all kinds of things happened at the kitchen table – drawing, fish, radio.

The kitchen table and the dining room table inspired two well known contemporary American works, both by California women.  Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is a very popular and moving collection of hopeful stories told by people living with disease, which is widely recommended by healers and has helped millions.  Her style embodies the informality, simplicity and deep conversation that happens around a simple table in a warm room filled with delicious cooking smells and dear friends and maybe even a mother to help you feel better. 

Artist Judy Chicago created “The Dinner Party” art installation in 1979, when I first saw it in San Francisco, and it is now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where I saw it again recently, 35 years later.  It is a large triangular table with 39 place settings of mythical and historic women, from Ishtar to Virginia Woolf, with ceramic plates decorated with symbols of each woman’s life and embroidered table fabric with more names.  A feminist art icon, it was controversial from the start, for its explicit sexual imagery, choice and omission of women, and whether it really is art.

The Dinner PartyI like it because of its formality; it looks like a state dinner, with a classy table cloth and fancy dishes and important guests.  I liked the tradition and routine of dinner at 6:30 and using your knife and fork correctly.  It seems a little stuffy now, but at that table I learned to talk and listen.  Imagine the conversation between Hildegard of Bingen and Emily Dickenson at this fancy formal table.  And you know those woman must have done work at their dining room tables, painting and poetry and all kinds of creative work. 

These days my own dining room table is taken over by a big jigsaw puzzle I’m doing.  Our kids are grown and gone and we eat mostly in the kitchen out of bowls. With spoons, little worry about the correct fork.  But I do still like to sit at table and talk and eat, even light a candle.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter