My grandparents at the dining room table in the family farmhouse.
I dropped a pen the other day, not an uncommon occurrence, but this time while bent over from my usual chair I noticed a chunk taken out of the underside of the kitchen table. Clearly one of the many careless children under this roof had done some damage and kept it quiet long enough for me to be unable to lay blame.
But while I was still hunched over, a flicker of recognition fired across my brain waves and I used my left hand to test a theory. Indeed, there was a matching chunk on the other side of the same piece of the table. Then the recognition fully washed over.
This kitchen table used to be our dining room table. Before that it was the dining room table at my parents’ house. Before that it was the dining room table at my grandparents’ farmhouse. It served that function nobly for many years, but most fresh in my memory is its last job: my grandmother, robbed of the use of her legs by a stroke several years earlier, was pushed to the table in her wheelchair where she sat, hour after hour, going over personal effects as my dad and his brothers worked diligently to clean up the house so it could be sold.
My grandparents had moved to the nursing home up town, but on work weekends whoever was in town would bring them back to the house. And my grandmother sat there at the table around which countless memories were made to look through old letters, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, farm records, checkbooks — quite literally anything that could be printed on a piece of paper. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were handwritten notes from the president amid all the report cards and church bulletins.
It’s an aside, but the one thing that sticks in my memory from being part of these weekends — we didn’t make it up there for all of them, and when we did it was usually with a headstrong toddler in tow — is a thank-you letter my mother wrote after having visited the homestead during a visit with my dad while they both were in college. Before they were married, long before they invented me and any of the life that followed since. Just a young couple who met at Coe College and fell in love, a gracious note in familiar handwriting from one Kohawk to another with no idea what paths they all might pursue.
But back to the present. I set down the pen and then put both hands under the table and felt the notches. I’m sitting in her seat. (Not her chair, this is an IKEA model; her chairs have gone ahead to the great furniture warehouse in the sky.) I’m typing on a months-old MacBook Pro and maybe someday some ancestor will wish I had the foresight to put that dropped pen to paper, but those kids are out of luck.
(First of all, if they want to see my handwriting, then I can set aside a few of the crossword puzzles I use the pen to complete. Secondly, if I was actually writing with ink, it would be both illegible and incomplete, as my brain can barely keep up with my typing fingers let alone my chicken scratch. Thirdly, I gotta get this stuff on the internet where words last forever as long as someone keeps paying the domain host.)
I loved my grandmother. Not that it’s a dramatic revelation, of course. A lot of people love their grandmothers, and they darn well should. I loved both of my grandmothers, deeply, although I’m only sitting at the same table as one of them (I have to go to my parents’ house to sit on the other grandmother’s couches) and right now, in this precise moment, the bond with her is something I need to feel deeply.
When my grandmother died almost nine years ago, we’d already had three of what would be four sons. She had a chance to meet them all, though the third kid only once, the last time I saw her. That’s the kid whose middle name comes from my grandfather, in case stuff like that matters. But she really got to know the oldest and had some good chuckles with the second. She would’ve loved the whole lot of them within an inch of their lives given the chance, but the world doesn’t always give good people what they deserve, so I guess I put a little hope in the idea she’s not too far away to stay connected somehow.
And it’s not as if this table recognition was some sort of unique reconnection. Mainly because I knew it was her table the entire time, but also because we got some useful items from the farmhouse. Mostly kitchen stuff in regular rotation — especially the orange mixing bowl the kids use to make buttercream — but a few heirlooms we’ve trucked around from house to house. Heck, I put tens of thousands of miles on her old minivan until it finally became too expensive to repair last winter.
But it wasn’t just the table, it’s that it was her spot for those important moments of turning through the pages of her life. That wheelchair represented a lot that she’d lost — was taken from her — but she put those marks into the underside of this table and now I can touch them whenever I want and feel her with me, with us.
Celebrating my dad’s 44th birthday in 1996. Same table.
My grandmother had three sons. One of them survived a rattlesnake bite, another appendicitis, another falling asleep at the wheel and driving up the side of a tree. She married a man who, when he was a farmhand for her family, contracted spinal meningitis (“I knew we only had one chicken but I saw three running in the yard,” he told us) and survived against all the odds stacked against a poor kid in rural Illinois in the 1930s. These are just the stories that come to mind immediately, goodness knows a woman whose 13th birthday coincided with Pearl Harbor, who married while battles raged in Korea and whose sons came of age during the Vietnam War had Seen. Some. Things.
Both of my grandmothers raised three boys (one had two girls in the mix as well) and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve wished I could talk with each grand lady about what it’s like to have all this action under one roof. How the yard is a literal mud pit, how socks are disposable, how the grocery bills rival the car payments, how the laundry involves emptying pockets of goodness knows what, how the dog isn’t even the loudest one, how you might as well let the fight go long enough for both sides to throw at least one punch, how we bought a house a few blocks from the hospital because the ambulance traffic is less an annoyance and more a comfort that we can always make it to the emergency room.
Every so often something in my subconscious fires just right and a deep sleep is rewarded with a dream where a dearly departed relative is able to make small talk about my life as a dad. It’s usually the grandmother who left us while when I’d just started college, before I met my future wife, whose passing made me realize how badly I wanted to just raise children. She’s not the only one, though, and even though such blessings are sparse, still there are things in my waking hours — such as these ragged notches under my table — that poke and prod at my psyche and remind me, thankfully, that the circle remains unbroken and we all live with pieces of those who loved us along the way, just as those folks had their own embedded experiences. Ideally we keep passing on only the good stuff, although we know the whole experience teaches important lessons.
I’m sitting right now, alone, at my seat — my grandmother’s seat — as a hard rain pounds outdoors. We’re living in isolation as a virus spreads across the globe and trying our best to keep everyone safe. Everyone here is mostly young and mostly healthy, but the world also is full of grandmothers who have lots to live for, lessons to impart, gifts to bestow and legacies to write. The uncertainty is mentally taxing, and trying to figure out how to explain things to children is a daily decision. Not everyone is going to survive, and adding any qualifiers to that seems selfish at best.
But the world remains as full of love as it is of danger. The sun rises and we try again. I don’t know what gives you comfort in trying times, but I’ve found a new trick: I just reach under the table, with both hands, and I gently touch the notches left from my grandmother’s wheelchair. An appraiser would call them defects. (They’d say the same of the damage on the surface, which is to be expected from a hardwood kitchen table at which children sit to do homework and test recipes and give the cat love and spill drinks and generally wreak havoc, but we don’t have this table as in investment in anything other than a functional nuclear family so who the heck cares, really?) They’ll never be defects to me, but reminders of a beloved woman who took time away from staring down her own mortality to appreciate a life full of names and faces and words and events and memories and love. I hated what that stroke took from her, but loved that she was there to watch me become a husband and a father. The older I get, the luckier I feel, and the more I realize my calling to be a good guy, a helper, a friend.
I’m really glad I dropped that pen the other day. I would’ve noticed those notches eventually, but I needed to reach out, to touch, to feel, right then. We all do, somehow, and I hope I’m not the only one to feel connected.