Are You Sure You Want to Sit at the Grown-Ups Table?
The rule is that we’re in charge of ourselves.
The children’s table in the kitchen is merry chaos. A few cousins use their forks to spear, their spoons to release the flood of gravy from the mashed potato moat. An older cousin eats quickly, eying the table in case of flying peas.
The rest of us eat what we want, how we want. The only rule is to keep the grown-ups out.
There is dessert. There is double dessert as long as we conspire to boast how we all had our vegetables and no one did anything bad.
We are creative storytellers. We are also epic shovelers of mashed potatoes and whatever we like best. At least one kid excels at snorting geysers of milk out their nose when someone says something funny. That makes the rest of us laugh and brings on more milk geysers.
My grandmother lived in a tidy Cape Cod house — as in small and tidy, bulging to accommodate the entire family for holidays. There were too many people for too little space, but we liked one another more than we liked space.
Every adult was squished at the dining room table. The table beckoned with candles, flowers, and abundance.
The large family meant only a few of us ever got to sit at the big people table in the dining room. Those older cousins were somber and quiet anyway, so it was no great loss to our joy. At our merry table, they were the stern ones who made us behave.
We were delighted to see them head into the dining room.
I sat at the adult table only once in those years of grandmother holidays.
An older cousin must have been sick or at someone else’s house. I was told that I was being given the rare and marvelous privilege of sitting with the grown-ups. Stay quiet, use your manners, and be good.
What was the fun in that?
I did as told, ate my meal somberly, and listened to the deadly dull conversation droning on around me. A long stare interrupted my moat building. No jokes were told. No milk was snorted.
Blah blah blah went the words around me. If this was being a grown-up, I had zero interest.
The kitchen was merry raucous. A chair hit the wall. Someone sprinted down the hall, grabbed a coat, and ran outside. One by one, the other chairs hit the wall and there was sprinting outside, door banging after the last kid left.
Kids raced great looping arcs across the front lawn, daring and teasing and laughing.
I looked down at dessert. It was not ice cream or cookies or anything I recognized. This was something called tapioca. It was white and nondescript, served in a pretty footed bowl.
I tried it. I liked it. I ate the whole bowl and scanned the table. There was a little left in the serving bowl.
One by one, the adults left the table, the women grumbling pretend arguing over who was going to wash and who was going to dry.
Soon it was just my grandfather and me sitting at the table. I didn’t know him well because my family lived hundreds of miles away and we only came for the big holidays.
He looked at me, looked over at the serving bowl.
“Looks like we have a second helping if we want one.”
I grinned gap-toothed joy.
He served us the rest of the pudding and showed me how he liked to top his off with cream.
It was the best pudding I’d ever had — with an old man who would have loved sitting at the children’s table.
The next holiday, I was back with the kids in the kitchen. The older cousin and their significant person broke up and the cousin was back with the adults.
Milk snorting and moat building ensued. We kept one another under control so the grown-ups let us have a good time.
My heart hurt for a second when I saw my grandfather sitting at the head of the table, watching children hurtle across the grass. The poor guy would have loved racing in the cold with us, but he had to stay inside with the grown-ups.
