I set the table for Sunday dinner thinking of the hundreds of Sundays gone before. Today I choose a cloth of white and plates I bought in England's Cotswolds at a factory once. I lugged them home in the backpack I carried onto the airplane. The glassware I place above each knife is stemmed and coppery colored, inherited from my grandmother who gave them to my father. I choose them after he died and we survivors go through cupboards dividing up things beautiful with memories.
I love these Sundays when the whole family comes to dinner. My quiet place will come alive with grown-up voices talking of this and that and with children's voices playing with cousins. For a time we will join together over food I have prepared to catch up, to exclaim, to discuss. No longer do I provide food to keep my children alive. They are all perfectly capable of doing their own providing these days. I provide to keep connections--this parent to my children, this grandparent to my grandchildren, brother and sister to each other, children to aunts and uncles. I hope to provide a constant way to reach out to one another across our various lives to remember, to create, to meld relationships into eternal links.
Sunday dinner seems insignificant for such an important goal. As I said to a friend some years ago, these days I find my self spectating more and matriarching less. In my children's busy lives in the middle of raising children themselves my role has changed. It can't be termed either bad or good, just changed. So I seek for crossroads where we--in such different stages, all of us--can touch, see each other, care (however briefly), and be glad.
And I wonder, as I look around the table, which of these grandchildren will someday inherit my grandmother's coppery-colored stemware and think of her,their great-great grandmother who brought them to our family. And be glad.
I love these Sundays when the whole family comes to dinner. My quiet place will come alive with grown-up voices talking of this and that and with children's voices playing with cousins. For a time we will join together over food I have prepared to catch up, to exclaim, to discuss. No longer do I provide food to keep my children alive. They are all perfectly capable of doing their own providing these days. I provide to keep connections--this parent to my children, this grandparent to my grandchildren, brother and sister to each other, children to aunts and uncles. I hope to provide a constant way to reach out to one another across our various lives to remember, to create, to meld relationships into eternal links.
Sunday dinner seems insignificant for such an important goal. As I said to a friend some years ago, these days I find my self spectating more and matriarching less. In my children's busy lives in the middle of raising children themselves my role has changed. It can't be termed either bad or good, just changed. So I seek for crossroads where we--in such different stages, all of us--can touch, see each other, care (however briefly), and be glad.
And I wonder, as I look around the table, which of these grandchildren will someday inherit my grandmother's coppery-colored stemware and think of her,their great-great grandmother who brought them to our family. And be glad.
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