This Table Has Its History

This table has its history. And when
The final meal’s over and the mourners leave
Will anyone look down and say, “Goodbye old wood,”
Or try to save it, bound by images
Year in year out, pausing before the ax?

It came into our home
Already old, the oak brown grey,
On five legs crudely carved
Half pedestal, half turned,
By some old Amish farmer’s son who’d quit
Old plainness, for a modern family of four, perhaps
Expandable to six, but we
Came, saw and bought it, then
Moved far away and kept the extra leaves;
The table had to fit into our nook,
The one we nearly lost when fancy plans
Demanded that the table go, and marble slabs
Bring house and family more up to date.

Disaster struck, the day destruction came:
Disaster trumped destruction, and I sent
The workmen packing. Fancy change
Was now on hold. A sign it was
From heaven, which had whispered Halt!
When I envisioned chopping off the past.
Now never would I jettison my table. It
Was where our family of six would eat
Each meal, and had seen our bowls
Of cereal, tomato soups and plates,
Of toast and marmalade and tuna sandwiches
And pasta piled high, or eggs and
Pungent apple juice and mugs
Of milk and cups of coffee; grapes and cheese,
And children’s place mats showing maps
Or aleph bets or scores of dinosaurs
Not to forget the views of Hershey Park
Near Amish farms. When we ate meat
This table was draped decorously
With tablecloths depicting flowers, dragons, sunsets, but
On Passover with spring time greens and blues
When all the family would peel apples
Chop chopping them on maple chopping boards.

Each passing year the children grew
And little friends would chop and they grew too;
Apples browned by cinnamon and wine
Sat heaped in bowls: out came the camera.

And every week still at the end of Shabbat we
Crowd round our table for Havdallah, when
We hold the braided candle, see ahead
Six days that stretch for workaday affairs,
Then sniff the cinnamon or lavender to sweeten them.
Out comes the camera! The weeks,
Now years, stretch way behind us into albums, years
Gone by.
Today come little granddaughters who paint,
The wooden table often daubed with blue
While baby boys crawl underneath, picking
Crumbs that fell from Grandpa’s challah board
As we these latter years are two alone
For Shabbat meals, two old lovers,
Eating on our wooden table, in simplicity.

The Amish rebel never dreamed his work
Would bind us with a non-rebellious glue
And halt us with a heart-beat
From chopping off the past.
Nor did he know his table had a mythic past:
My memory, aged four, of Sarah, my great-grandmother
We all called Bobba, in her long black skirt
And apron, standing on the old stone floor
In London where the family
Had fled from Vitebsk in the year
That Queen Victoria died. She stood,
My ancient Bobba, chopping, clopping on her board
Upon her wooden table, onions, carrots, herbs,
All tumbled into steaming soups, and then the knife –
Where is it now? – lay like a coat of arms
Across the wood, all done. Our life was rich
And full of flavor, in that kitchen long ago
But lives on in my hands
Which wield my knife upon the board
And on my wooden table with the scents
Of soups and sounds of music, children and
The chop chop chopping on the warm brown wood.
Disaster, you were welcome – you breathed life
Into what really mattered – life is good.

LRH January 22, 2012