My mother used to own a small retail store in a smallish, upscale little city in Michigan. When I was old enough I’d help her out here and there, running the store. But in that store details were to my mother what penis enlargement is to email, so I tried not to spend too much time there. There was a specific set of words I was to use when greeting customers in person and by phone, and there needed to be the correct intonation during delivery of said greetings. Price tags had to line up perfectly with the edges of the products, products lined up perfectly on their shelves.
It was enough to make me daydream of stripping naked and screaming while I peed on the front entryway of the store as customers passed, just to shake loose from the stringent order of everything.
But in time I’ve found that the freak that had such a controlling grip on my mother’s business operations had wriggled it’s way into my head too, both for things involving my business and things at home. I used to get mad at Diane if she happened to step on a magazine of mine that was laying on the floor because, hello? Can you read a magazine when it has a wrinkle? No, you can’t. It’s a well known fact that wrinkles render reading material worthless. They also make OCD patients want to pee on front entryways.
So I really had no clue what I was in for when we had kids, but I went into fatherhood expecting that there would be some messes. What I didn’t expect was how much of our furniture would be rendered scrap lumber and fabric. Agalia had her share of messes at mealtime when she was just a baby, and the bargain table/chair set we bought for the kitchen in early 2004 quickly revealed why it was so reasonable. The constant wiping of the table top and trapping of moisture beneath place mats has caused the dark brown stain and lacquer finish of the table to lift in a few small places, revealing the very light colored wood beneath. And with the constant battering the chairs have taken, from strap-on booster chairs to indelicate shoves to being nearly flipped over by DJ at every meal, our dining set has lived a hard 4 years. Until recently, every nick and scrape simultaneously carved out a little piece of my grey matter; I hated that our kids were having to grow up eating at a table that was such a heap of crap. I hated that it would only get worse, because we’re in no spot to be buying a new dining set, and there seems to be no way I can stop the avalanche of furniture damage that is Agalia and DJ.
Early this spring I’d scheduled an appointment with a prospective client in a neighboring city. I chit-chatted with the husband as he brought me in to sit at his kitchen table. He told me about his four children and that when they had the twins (kids 3 &4) they stopped using a baby monitor (”If it’s important, someone will scream loud enough for us to hear it,” I remember him saying). As I was sitting at their table and I was struck by how beat up the thing was. And wobbly. Like a thousand people had eaten a million meals there, each one cleaning up after themselves using a brillo pad. Or gravel. And you know? It felt good. Comfortable. Like good people had spent many memorable parts of their lives sitting at that table, sharing meals, telling stories, laughing and crying. Like it was part of their family history. A historic document for that family, each groove in the wood like a recording on vinyl, it’s music only audible in the memories of the people who lived at that table.
Grew up at that table.
When I got home I had a change of heart about my own table and chairs. Though the pieces were probably made by cheap labor in poor conditions, grubby fingers touching the wood before a finish could be applied, guaranteeing a flawed final product, it’s allowed us to carve our own familial grooves. Make our own recordings of our generation of the Clay family. The bits of packing tape embedded into the finish where we tried to affix a place mat, a failed attempt to reduce the mess DJ made each night. The raised grain, swelled from open pores absorbing the water from the three-thousandth wiping of Agalia’s place at the table, now worn bare. The chair spindles scarred and scraped like a little boy’s knee on an asphalt playground. It doesn’t feel like a reminder of bad decisions or tight budgets or the frustration that stems from our kids causing damage to our stuff. It feels comfortable. Like home.
And when DJ gets older, I’m totally going to use the “grooves on vinyl” analogy when I tell him how he got the’recording’ on his forehead. Poor kid. I was assured that the city pool got the worst of it.
Last spring we’d planted 10 strawberry plants long after they should have been planted and only one survived. That one grew like a weed last year without fruiting, but this year it was covered in blossoms. Agalia was dance-in-a-circle-while- repeating-the-same-word-a-thousand-times excited about the prospect of having strawberry shortcake using strawberries from the garden. I was so excited I couldn’t take a steady picture of the blossoms, but we counted 40 of ‘em.
