Safe Under the Table
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Smooth, dark wood running close to the floor wove the table legs together and created highways for pocket race cars. Each groove was flawless, each ridge in the supports rounded and detailed, but its underside was almost always covered by a table cloth or cut off by the angle in the narrow dining room. The table hadn’t been moved more than a foot in either direction since it had been set there 30 years ago. The length and weight made that nearly impossible, but for cleaning before and after holiday meals, it could be lifted from one spot to another if two men worked together at each end and it was only moved a step to the side.
During the spring, several birthdays belonging to nearby family members were celebrated, but those events were brief and poorly attended, an afterthought without nearly as much gusto as the major winter holidays. In the summer, the grandchildren were left to the grandparents for the day in this house, and the place under the table became magic, a private world where the littlest boy among the cousins being watched could dream up adventures for his solider and space figures, color and draw and imagine himself in the cuckoo clock that hung on the wall above or roasting in the afternoon sun on the carpet spot that the sun warmed through the house’s back windows. The grandparents used the tabletop as a collecting place for the day’s mail that turned into last week’s mail, newspapers, coats, hats and other items that gather in level dead spaces. This layer made the ornate table easier to walk past without noticing and hid the boy deeper in his fantasy world.
Every year, when the winds came up and the days shortened, the tabletop was cleared a few days before the gatherings when as many as 50 people would show up and throw heavy coats in the master bedroom, the presents were set down in piles against the wall and near the fireplace, and the plates and silverwarwe were brought out so that the table could be used for its true purpose. Adults mistook the curvy stabilizers to be footrests. They put up their feet on the wonder the boy knew and he smiled – his own parents seated at the table – because he knew they weren’t children anymore and if they were, they still wouldn’t see the seclusion as he did.
His older cousins were just older enough that he was excluded from the group. There were three others, all older, closer in age, at 12 and 13 ages, and they often inadvertently did not include him. He came to the table to sulk, but he was too little to know that’s what it was or how it might impact him. Hidden in the winding wood, in the shadowy trunked legs that cast perfect rectangular darkness, he found his creativity, a sweet world that was all his own, and yet inclusive, dream-lke but present under the table and all its flaws, its hinges and nails stamped through the corners.
The wood was slickly finished and well preserved. The boy is nearly 34 years old now, and the table is in the same place. His grandparents are gone, but family owns the house and the table. Thw wood is still well mainted and buried under the same usual clutter, and it seems that the memory of his childhood can be the same way.
