The Picnic-Kitchen Table

We just purchased our first house and were about to move. We were pregnant with our first son, Doug, and we would be losing a salary. It was the winter of ‘68, and I was making under $7500 as a junior high school civics teacher. We had rushed to buy a house while we could qualify. Our meager savings had gone into the down payment. The house cost $16,500, a pittance by today’s standards, but it seemed enormous then. We were nearly broke, and had not yet bought furniture. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and wondered aloud if we would be moving into a half-empty house. We had a bed and dresser, a couch, and a couple of old chairs for the living room, but no furniture for the baby, the guest bedroom, or the kitchen.

With the help of our families and friends we acquired a crib and the related paraphernalia to hosting the soon-to-be baby Doug.  We still needed a kitchen table. We looked in new and used furniture stores, antique shops, flea markets, and even the Salvation Army store. We found everything but kitchen tables, or at least one that we could afford on our budget of $25. Finally, we found a true bargain at a pool and patio store, a red wood picnic table with two benches for $19.95. It seated six without buying chairs. It was perfect, and we knew it would work for us for a year or so, or until we could find a more suitable and permanent replacement.

“The best laid plans…” That picnic table with numerous transformations was still in our kitchen fifteen years later. I varnished it and later stripped it, painted it green, later white, and eventually glued and varnished a top to it. Before it got its new top, glasses of milk, soda, iced tea, and lemonade too numerous to count dripped through the cracks of its cross slat construction. Equally disastrous was the occasional adult beverage or coffee spill wending its path of least resistance to the floor below.

On a rainy day in March, we sat there for Doug’s first birthday party, a picnic scheduled for the back yard. Four-year old Drew colored all the Easter eggs there one morning before the rest of us awakened. Friends gathered for meals, drinks, dessert and coffee, or just for the conversation, first on those butt-breaking benches and later on equally demanding wooden folding chairs. The benches eventually were ushered to the back yard. The chairs just wore out, once with our friend Wayne nearly skewered in the process; but the table endured.

I tapped out my first book at that table on an old manual typewriter from our college years. That was “B.C.,” before computers. What once had been just a picnic-kitchen table had become a picnic-kitchen-table-desk. By the time I was onto my second book, I had a computer, and the table had found its way to the patio. That table was the altar at which grace was shared and the forum for nightly discussions of a decade of school days. It was the family gathering place under which Cindy, our retriever, served as a furry foot warmer and automatic vacuum cleaner.

I suspect that many of us have similar kitchen table memories. We pay our bills there, watch sports or the evening news, agonize over our 1040s, play games, and assemble puzzles. As parents, we sit there over cold coffee anxiously waiting for our sons and daughters to return home from their first time out with the car or high school proms. If our kitchen tables could talk, they would relate the joys and pains of our common memories etched into the grain of their surfaces. Nevertheless, they remain silent, and alas, in its silence our picnic-kitchen-table-desk finally found its way to the humility of the garage sale. I miss it and all of what it reminds me.

“The Picnic Kitchen Table”
Copyright 2010 © Michael J. McCabe
All rights reserved.