Consider This

By LC Van Savage

LET MY TABLE GO

I’ve promised Mongo that I’m finally on a Five Year Plan to empty our home of all the packratted stuff I’ve---well, packratted. He smiles when I say that and it’s a sardonic smile, but there’s a hint of hopefulness in it too. I really save too much junk, and while I know the psycho reasons for that, I’m sixty-five now and the daily obituaries are telling me I’d better get the job done before our kids have to do it, because no matter what Far Beyond I get kicked into after gagging my last, I know I’ll still be able to hear their enraged bellows.

I’ll hear them howling, "How much does it cost to rent a dumpster? Maybe two!" and "Someone, please, one of us, has anyone got a match?" and "She saved all this crap? WHY??" and "She didn’t live through the Depression. This saved stuff is JUNK!" And of course, "Oh, !#@#$%$^&**#@# Mom!!"

So OK, maybe I’m not exactly doing Feng Shui, but I’m really getting rid of stuff, emptying shelves, clearing things. It’ll take at least 5 years, doing one job a day. If I don’t live to be 70, well then the kids get to do the job after all, because Mongo sure won’t. He’ll have locked the door and beat it outta here, and will be living in a small, flat condo with an unlisted number.

I’ve spent the better part of a year looking hard at a big old table we own and had behind our livingroom couch. It had been quite old already when it was a wedding gift to my grandmother in 1935. She was called JKR because she fancied herself at least as important as FDR. This is a heavy mahogany table, too small for a dining table, an odd rectangular size. Apparently it was once a "receiving table," beautiful, carved tables against one wall of a mansion’s enormous front hall on which there would be a large bouquet of magnificent flowers and a silver salver to receive that day’s calling cards.

Back in Victorian times, apparently the wealthy, mostly women, would spend their days calling on each other. Can you imagine anything more boring than driving around all day in a buggy, staring at the back end of a horse and stopping over and over to "pay a call" on another wealthy Victorian lady who may be out looking at the back end of her own horse while she called on other folks. There were no computers or telephones then, so I guess one just took one’s chances. One would therefore prove that one had called by leaving one’s calling card on that silver salver.

The table, solid mahogany, has thick, corkscrew-carved legs, (same design carved heavily around the table-top’s’ edges) and those legs end in large wooden balls. Grasping them with four huge teeth are saber-toothed tiger heads. These heads are also deeply carved angry faces, but not done in brass. They are copper. Magnificent!

In the spirit of quasi-Feng Shui I recently gave that table to our #2 son Mark. And, seeing it departing in the back of his van was not easy for me. I began to remember the good times around that clumsy, odd-sized table. JKR had squeezed it into her tiny apartment kitchen where it looked completely out of place, and had covered it with a plastic cloth. But we had wonderful, long talks at that table, stuffing down her luscious peanut butter cookies with the fork-tine design pressed into the tops, and we’d speak of her long life and how; The time has come the Walrus said/ To talk of many things/Of shoes and ships and sealing wax/And cabbages and kings.

It hurt my heart to see it go, but it was time. Take care of that old table Mark. It carries a plethora of joyful memories. It’s time to add your own.