{Here we go again: another room, or this time, a number of rooms designated for dining. It’s part of my series in Lent 2024, in case you are just reading this in 2057.}
Joan and I joined our friends Chuck Melchert and Anabel Proffitt in Gloucester, MA for a poetry and art workshop many years ago. It was led by the artist and writer Carol Egmont St. John at the Rocky Neck Art Colony. We wrote and we drew.
One of the first exercises Carol led us in was in thinking about our childhood family dinner table. Who was there for meals? Where did they sit? We weren’t to answer verbally, but to draw the scene. With our non-dominant hand. Probably so the real artists couldn’t show the rest of us up! Plus those childhood memories when documented on paper looked as if they were drawn by children! It was a fun activity to help us all get to know everyone in the group. But it also grew more serious as we shared our earliest memories of our childhood families around dining room (or kitchen) tables. Some stories were tinged with melancholy, some with joy.
The table I drew was the one pictured here. I’ve previously written of the Liberty Ave. house, a touch of village history, having been built in the mid-1820s by a prominent family in the town’s history. It was the home Mom loved most looking back, and the one in which all six of us kids grew up (in one stage or another…I, the oldest, was in my teens and the youngest was born while we lived there). Dad sat at one end, Mom at the other, the end closest to the small kitchen. The three of us boys sat on one side, and the three girls on the other. I don’t recall whether we always sat in the same chairs in the same order.
The kitchen of that house was, as I said, small. No room for a kitchen table. That meant that every meal was served in the dining room.
Breakfast didn’t always find us together. Especially when school was out for the summer. With rare exceptions, it was cereal and milk, orange juice, and for Mom and Dad, coffee. There might have been a cooked breakfast now and then, but not very often. While many families didn’t have lunch at home while school was in session, we sometimes did. School was always “walkable,” and if there was time, some of us would rush home for sandwiches. I don’t remember eating many meals in elementary or junior high school. High school was a different story; it was too far to walk home for lunch. Dad might even have come home for that mid-day meal if he could break away from IBM, just two miles from home.
We called the evening meal supper. And except for brothers Kim and Steve, who in our later years on Liberty Avenue might have had some sports practices, we were all around the table at suppertime. And with eight of us there, you can imagine the pandemonium. Dad once or twice placed a small tape recorder under the table to record the sounds of six kids at table, the confusion of voices, dishes being passed, laughter and arguments. We were all astounded at the clammor when Dad played it back to us.
When I look at the slides I took back then, I see countless birthday parties around that table, I see Grandpa Kellam’s birthday celebration, some special year I’ve forgotten, maybe he’d turned 70? 80? We had a rare family portrait taken in that room. It’s great of everyone but Mom. She looks so tired. Of course, she is. She had to get six of us ready for it, and that wouldn’t have been easy. (I’ve spent two hours looking for that picture; I’ll find it someday.)
Of course, through the years, that was not the only Kellam family dining room. When the family moved from Liberty Avenue, I had gone to college, so my visits home to other dining rooms were infrequent, whether going home to Endicott or to Raleigh when Dad’s work moved them there. My brothers and sisters shared meals and special occasions in rooms I can’t draw with one hand or the other. But if I go way, way back, I can picture the dining room of the house in Vestal (NY) where I lived from age five until I turned 10 or 11. The house was new, but interior photos show old furnishings. And in that dining room, besides the table, I see Mom’s old Singer sewing machine, converted from treadle operation to an electric motor. And this clear memory of the day I scared the daylights out of everyone.
My Aunt Marge and Uncle Keith had come over (they lived nearby, so visits were frequent), and for some reason, I decided to hide from everybody. I must have been maybe 6. It was a game at first. Between the kitchen and the dining room was swinging door. It was propped open, into the dining room. The space behind the door was the perfect place to hide. When I was missed, voices started calling for me. I stayed hid. I could hear the concern in all their voices. But I stayed hid. Until Aunt Marge happened to see me behind the door. “He’s here!” I can still hear her voice. As well as the expressions of relief, and the warnings that I should never pull that trick again. I didn’t.
Until I ran away. But that’s another story.
In the meantime, try drawing your family table from your childhood years. Use any hand you like; no one’s looking. Tell yourself a memory. And ask yourself what you learned from it.
Peace, Grace, and Jazz! 