They Brought the Table with Them

Fifty years ago, my late parents came to Atlanta for the first time. We had moved into a house after living in apartments in New York for 12 years. We invited my parents to visit, and they decided to drive from St. Louis to get a lay of the land and spoil our daughters.

Before the dust (literally) had settled, my mother let me know that she and my father had decided to address a situation I had shared about buying a dining room table. In our first weeks in our new city, we learned that Atlantans are natural hosts who love to entertain, and they best express this proclivity by serving delicious meals that are eaten at bona fide dining room tables.

In New York, we lived in apartments without dining rooms; therefore, we employed folding tables when we had company. We didn’t own an eating surface that would offer the Southern hospitality we had been receiving. To be respectable Atlantans, we needed a proper dining room table. We now had a real dining room, and folding tables simply would not do.

In my parents’ basement, my father was storing his deceased parents’ dining room table and an ornate head chair that went with it. The polished, sturdy wooden table, with fancily carved legs, had been purchased second-hand by my working-class grandparents from the estate of a wealthy St. Louis family in the early 1900s. We could re-home the heirloom table and activate our dining room at the same time.

The table was adaptable — it accommodated eight diners comfortably, and we could expand it to seat 12 by inserting a very large leaf that was stored in its innards. We certainly could use the table and chair, but it seemed selfish and wasteful to have them shipped.

However, my parents had made up their minds, and my mother declared that they’d already decided to drive the table and chair to Atlanta. My mother explained, “Daddy (my mother didn’t drive) will drive while I navigate. We’ll be there before Shabbos in two weeks.” I tried hard to dissuade them because I certainly didn’t want my later-middle-aged parents to assume the roles of interstate movers.

Nevertheless, I started picturing guests dining and chatting around the big vintage table, so I called my parents to say that we would hire professional movers. My mother insisted that they were perfectly capable of bringing the table and chair themselves. Period. All I could do was pray that, in two weeks, my parents and their cargo would arrive safely, each in one piece.

The nine-hour drive from St. Louis to Atlanta has some challenging long stretches. There was no way to communicate during the odyssey because this was before the use of cellphones (or GPS. Would my mother, the navigator, be able to follow the AAA triptych directions to our house before dark?)

Wonder of wonders, my father’s big old Buick pulled up late Friday afternoon. We had “hired” teen neighbors to carry the table, the detached legs, and big chair into our house. As our daughters jumped into my parents’ arms, my father sniffed deeply and exclaimed, “It smells like Shabbos here!” (Fortunately, the trip hadn’t affected his olfactory acuity.)

We reattached the table’s legs and set the table for Shabbat dinner. But first, my father had something he wanted to tell his grandchildren, “I have a longer history with this table than with anything else in the world.” I knew what he meant.

My immigrant grandmother gave birth to my father in 1915. She was too modest and frightened to go to a hospital, so a local Yiddish-speaking midwife opened the wide table to its full length and covered it with multiple thick blankets and clean sheets to create a sturdy makeshift home-birthing surface. My father was born on that table.

Every so often, someone asks about our vintage table. I answer, “My paternal grandparents bought it second-hand over 100 years ago, my father was born on it, and in the mid-1970s, he drove it 900 miles from St. Louis.” Sometimes a terse answer can contain a big story.