Speak Tables, Speak

I think my earliest kitchen table was blue and it had a drawer holding utensils to slurp, stab and slice. The tools one needed to grow up. That table was the place for high-level policy decisions. My parents would settle world affairs as if on some summit. Of course, they pretty much agreed with themselves. When it came down to less lofty matters, like cursing Uncle Irving for God knows what or how to get Mr. Dalebrook to settle his outstanding bill after the drugstore went belly-up, what better place to plot strategies or reconcile differences.  

Oh yes, I suppose we ate there too.  I have fond memories of burnt liver and boiled chicken which I tried, in vain, to hide under the mashed potatoes. But then there was also my mother’s world class pot roast, and I shall leave with that whiff in my memory vault.

The Algonquin Round Table, or Vicious Circle, was comprised of NYC literati including Dorothy Parker who had a habit of committing suicide unsuccessfully, Robert Benchley, Jascha Heifetz (to my surprise), a loquacious Harpo Marx, the NY Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman to name-drop a few. It all started when a few members decided to surprise Woollcott by roasting him. It turned into a ten-year lunch. They were said to have viper-tongues and concealed stilettoes as they jabbed each other with taunts, barbs and gleefully mean wit. It was the post WWI roaring 20s, with a dozen speakeasies on every block in midtown Manhattan.  Gradually they drifted off to Hollywood or sobered up with the crash of 1929. The table outlasted them all. 

Speak tables, speak.

Going back in time to mid-18^th century England, Samuel Johnson sat with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and assorted luminaries around a table every week at Turk’s Head Tavern. James Boswell was there to record the pearls of wisdom dropping onto their plates and into their ale. The group was called The Club. One had to have a silver tongue to gain a seat at this table. I wonder if their waiters wondered if they’d put their money where their mouth was. In later years, Tennyson, Kipling, and Eliot made the cut but not Dickens, Trollope or Hardy.  Some tables don’t have a leg to stand on.

Johnson’s words were precise and mellifluous yet not ornamental. One could be happily reprimanded and save the insult under glass as Lord Chesterfield did. Perhaps the greatest export of imperialist England was language itself. It flowed around six continents leaving its mark of empire upon which the sun never set.

Then there would be the solitary figure sitting and ruminating on such petty matters as the meaning of life. That would be myself at a corner table in the Automat where I could introvert into my coffee and take communion with a Kaiser roll.

Now I sit with dear friends at a table commiserating over the thousand cuts into the entrails of our dear-departed country. A fly has found low-cost housing in my salad. The lettuce is undocumented. The music is a dirge, but we move the conversation from lamentation to exclamations of charged air and green remembered hills.