The Kitchen Table

When I was a kid, the only person in my family to own a real desk was my father; it was a second-hand rolltop with lots of cool cubbyholes, at which he sat to pay bills and do the bookkeeping for our family store. The only space big enough in our small house for a big desk and large chair was the basement, to which he descended a couple of times each week. Neither my mother, my brother, nor I had a desk or worktable because we didn’t need one. We had the kitchen table.

Our table was surrounded by four chairs with red faux leather seats. It had chrome legs and a gray Formica top with confetti-colored flecks, typical of kitchen tables all over America in the 1950s. Other than our beds, it was our family’s most essential piece of furniture.

The table gradually acquired a permanent record of incidents it had borne. My father used the surface to build a cardboard dollhouse for me out of sturdy storage boxes from his store, an endeavor which left faint scratches from his X-Acto knife. My brother, while decorating a balsa wood airplane from a kit, accidentally knocked over a bottle of black ink, which—even though my parents tried to clean it—left a permanent shadowy stain. To help my mother prepare dinner, I often sat at the table to peel carrots or potatoes. I once opened a can of whole beets and sliced them on a too-small cutting board (my parents considered beets to be a superfood); by the time my mother checked on me, a beet juice stain was about to join other permanent blemishes my brother and I had left over the years. Mom could never totally remove it, underscoring why ancients used beet juice as a permanent dye.

On that table, my mother traced clothing patterns, folded laundry, rolled out dough, and wrote letters to her parents and unmarried siblings (long distance phone calls were expensive in the 1950s. People wrote letters!) She covered the tabletop with newspaper when she mixed a paste out of flour and water in a bowl for me to use as glue for pictures that I cut out of magazines for a home-made scrapbook I kept. (Making a scrapbook with pictures cut from magazines was just one of the no-cost art projects of my youth.)

We kids played Chinese Checkers, Pick-up-sticks, and Dominos on the table, but games had to be put away before dinner. After dinner, the table became the base where my brother and I did homework, drew pictures, or worked on messy school projects. After a full day accommodating our family, the tabletop was vigorously scrubbed and ready for breakfast the next day. School necessities and other paraphernalia were laid on the table each morning, so we wouldn’t forget anything.

Somehow, there was room on that small table for our books, occasional science projects, and my brother’s baseball glove, along with the breakfast dishes. On alternate Wednesday nights, my parents played Bridge there, and once a month my father’s pals rotated to our house to play cards, snack on peanuts and drink Pepsi Cola. When we moved, we gave the table to the couple who bought our house. They were newly married and had only a card table for dining.

I was recently browsing in a resale shop, where I spotted TWO chrome-legged Formica tables. The six-chair table had a flecked yellow top like the one that was in my Aunt Shirley’s kitchen, and the four-chair table had a turquoise top like the one at our neighbor, Minnie Fendler’s, house. The store’s proprietor eased over to tell me, as I stood in a daze of kitchen table memories, “Those are originals. Even with a few stains, they’re hard to find in good condition. They’re classic, vintage!”

Well, I wondered, feeling decidedly vintage myself, could I find a gray table like the one where my mother folded laundry and my father built a dollhouse? My curiosity led me to the Internet, where I discovered that original mid-century Formica tables are ultra-trendy, and replicas are currently being widely reproduced! Now, anyone can buy a new table without scratches or stains. But, as for me, I admit that I’m a pushover for old furniture that bears traces of its history.