In Praise of a Sturdy Trestle Table

I have been grieving.  Our best local newspaper--The Minneapolis Star Tribune--is not a great newspaper, but it is pretty good.  One could learn quite a lot about what is going on in the world by reading it.  Our other municipal paper is suffering from universal newspaper woes, and lack of income.  It reports mostly sports and local happenings.

On our quick trips to Tucson, to which we are returning, we have been buying the Daily Star.  It is more like our second best newspaper.  Thus the cause for my grieving.

It sounds almost elitist, but Mari and I have promised ourselves that we will continue our subscription to the New York Times, in order to improve the taste of our morning coffee.  We will take the Daily Star, too, of course, because it will, better than the Times, report about the place where we will live.

Traveling across the western part of the country, as we have been doing, means that we have read whatever the local newspaper is, nearly every day.  It is not an exercise in American identity.  It is, rather, almost always, a view of the local life.  Of course.  The economics of newspapers dictates that it will be so, almost always.

We have also been examining ourselves, necessarily, not voluntarily.  Moving to a house half the size of this one means that we have committed ourselves to looking at what we have, and who we are, and paring ourselves down to fit.  What we have decided to keep, and what we have decided to leave behind is a little like looking at all those newspapers.

We have a unique dining room table:  once a bakery work bench on steel legs, it now stands on a maple trestle.  The two of us do not need a ten foot long table, but there it is!  Even when just the two of us sit at it, it surrounds us with several decades of memories:  our best friends, our families, our menage of children and their friends, the Belgium Chamber Orchestra, people who just showed up at the door because it was Norwegian Constitution Day, or because they remembered we lived somewhere in that town, and most recently, several of our new neighbors who saw that their new neighbors--us--had backed a trailer into the driveway, and the doors were open.

We sat at the table, and talked to each other.

I don't want a fashionable table.  I want a table where people can sit and talk to each other, long after the food is gone.  It is a table sturdy and compelling enough to make us want to stay there, and talk to each other.  To laugh, and argue with each other.  To hold the hardest and most absurd of arguments.

A good table should be like a really good newspaper:  a place to talk about almost everything.  Flimsy tables are like flimsy newspapers.  They hold only flimsy things:  the weather, sports, potholes, local politics.  A good table will support things that careful people avoid:  politics, religion, race, science, and disagreements.  Wine.  Good food.  And laughter.