A Mixture of Things

"A potpourri:  a stew made of different kinds of meat."
"From French:  literally, "rotten pot".  A mixture of things.  A medley.

Thus:

We had a dinner, recently, a most pleasant dinner.  We had a bit of a ragged time getting started, but our company--all of us there, composed of family and family-friends and friends of friends--settled into a most agreeable bond around food and talk and the season.

The wind howled outside, in a most unusual way.
Things blew, and went bump in the night.
The wind picked up the rain and threw it at the windows up under the eaves.
In the morning, I picked up the potted plants blown over onto their sides.
It was just punctuation for our pleasantries.

*     *     *

Our table is a foundation in my life.

It was, once, a bakery table, hammered together on the diagonal by carpenters as if laying a maple floor at waist level, layers thick, standing first on heavy pipe legs, and worn down to tell a story by bakers thumping bread dough into shape and satisfaction, dividing it with knives gradually creating shallow valleys on the surface.

The pipe legs are long gone, and a rock maple trestle, created according to the memory of something I saw in Norway, shoulders the story created by those bakers on Water Street, in Decorah, Iowa.

Large numbers of our friends have sat around that table.  Generations of college students who lived in the house with us carried the food we cooked for each other to that table, and trained each other in the art of growing up kindly.  The Belgian Chamber Orchestra--as many as could--sat at that table, and everywhere else in the house, after a concert, catching up on wine and whatever was to eat, after a concert at the college.  Dozens of colleagues and friends came to stand where the bakers had stood, and everywhere else in the house, just to enjoy each other, and good bread and wine.

The table has traveled, more than once to Tucson and back, and to homes in Minneapolis and Eagan, and then to Tucson, again.  Its shoulders are stout.  Its stories are half-forgotten, so many are there.

I find it difficult to sit there, and not remember.

*     *     *

I am, long since, a resident of a thoroughly secular world, not because I do not know what religion is, but perhaps because I do.  

This morning, still thinking of our most recent dinner, I remembered this:

"I Jesu navn, til bords vi går.

Gud velsigne den mat vi får.

I Jesu navn.  Amen."

For perhaps fifteen or twenty years, I never sat down to eat at the earliest table I knew without hearing someone recite that announcement and hope, carried from an island in Norway by our father, first, before we ate.  In our mother's family, Grandpa Jacobson improvised his prayers, but we had a less-flexible formula. 

For the last . . . oh, forty years, we who gathered at our bakery table, have lifted our glasses to each other, before we ate--and while, and after--wishing each other well, not as a request from on high, but as a way of being glad for each other.  Regulars at our table have learned that the size of the table, alone, has removed the obligation to clink glasses--always a clumsy ritual, anyway--and just to look across at each other, across our glass, in salute.  

*     *     *

At a Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon, recently, on another night with the wind blowing cold air through a door that could not hold its own, I noticed a man at a neighboring table, a bit late to dinner, raise his folded hands in a silently-mouthed prayer before he ate.  

"How odd!", I thought.  "How solitary!  How obvious, his privacy!"

*     *     *

I deeply miss the company of people who know what it is to propose a toast before dinner, and during, and after.  I want to hear how the host came to think of the occasion, or when first the cook discovered a fine potpourri.  I want to raise a glass, almost privately, to what someone just said, or did, to gladden the time, and to see a glass in return.  I want to toast the young couple for just being there, at this old table, with us, and wish them such a table of their own, someday.   

Were I as old as I sometimes feel, at eighty-and-five, I might recite, "I Jesu navn", but it is too late for that.  I should rather raise a glass, almost formally, in good humor and celebration of what it is to sit at a fine, old table together.  

And then turn to our knives and forks.