Speak, Tables, Speak

I think it was blue. It had a drawer with utensils. Forks to stab, spoons to slurp and knives to make wounds. My brother and I didn’t speak much but he never let me forget who had rank by four years. Fortunately, that was enough distance between us for me to go my own way. That table might also have been where I learned pinochle, Parcheesi and backgammon or did they all happen on the living room rug? The kitchen table was the place of 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 Gods know what or how to get Mr. Dalebrook to settle his outstanding bill after the drugstore went belly-up, what better place to 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 plate on the well-remembered table.

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, the Jazz Age, with a dozen speakeasys 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. 

Going back in time to mid-18^th century Merry Old 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. Twelve pence (one shilling) could buy you beef, bread and beer with one pence left over for a tip. Oh, for those pubs of yesteryear! 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 was neither a poet or playwright of note. Yet he was author of the Dictionary of the English Language which ultimately led to the Oxford English Dictionary. When Johnson spoke, one listened. His sentences were rounded and sculptural, patterned with equipoise, antithesis and irony. His 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. Johnson recognized that language was a living thing; it grew organically out of the magnificent chaos of human discourse, ever expanding as well as shrinking and fading away. Johnson not only gave definitions but offered examples of usage bringing in both idioms and literary references including Shakespeare. An elegant sentence might find the beginning phrase separated from last by a dozen commas. By the fourth round of Guinness, it’s a wonder anyone could remember the initial clause as, one by one, they may have drunk themselves under the table.

From the sublime to the banal, I remember when a group of male friends recreated their fifteen minutes of glory by moving a salt shaker, napkin and sweetener around a table, enacting some war scene or sports heroics. All the while a man in the next booth might be deconstructing his blintzes as a fly finds a homeland in his sour cream.

Return me to a corner table in the Automat where I could introvert into my coffee and take communion with a Kaiser roll.

For millennia, lofty oratory and humble mumbles have passed across tables. Speak, tables, speak.