Читать книгу Risking the Rapids - Irene O'Garden - Страница 12

The Oaken Field

In his early fan photos, Dad could have passed for Clark Gable’s less rakish, undimpled brother: same dark hair, generous brow, mustache. And he wasn’t even on camera yet.

Here in our ’50s dining room, he presided at our long, heavy, Spanishly-dark oak refectory table, curly swerves carved into the massive ball feet and the matching chair backs. If our family were a piece of furniture, it would be this weighty, battered, accommodating, honest table. The most stimulating, philosophical, and entertaining conversations took place here; later, some of the most traumatic.

The grand rambunctious parliament of dinner: huge table, edged with eager us, tipping in the carven chairs, yearning to tell what we learned in school, to ignite some grand discussion, to contribute to it, make some rare, insightful point: to solve the very sound of the tree falling by itself in the forest.

Get the dictionary! Look it up! Semantics! Standard English! And always, if we talked enough, we’d come to the Nature of God.

A stone too heavy for us to lift. But we would try, as surely as we’d try to lick our elbows for the hundred dollars Dad promised on nonsense nights when we played The Rhyming Game, or Puck, a hockey of the hands with a milkbottle cap, or Dad made Clown Sundaes, or told funny stories, or invented games, word games, games of love, Mom laughing and abashed, proud and alarmed at her brood. In the best of times.

Which is where we will start.

With the December night in 1952, Dad hatched a clever way to teach us table manners. (We have it in writing.) I like to imagine how it came about.