MEACHAM LANE MEMOIRS/The Kitchen Table

 

The Kitchen Table

The little house on Meacham Lane was probably no more than about 700-800 square feet, a tiny kitchen with a metal bordered and Formica topped table and four chairs you could see in almost every kitchen of all the houses on the gravel road.  There was a living room with a small black and white T.V,  couch, chair and curio cabinet, and a single bathroom down a short hall  leading back from those two rooms.  Two small bedrooms of course, one for Mother and Dad, and one for Ken and I, were located across the hall from each other with the bathroom in between. Early on Ken and I shared a bed until better times financially led to bunk beds.

Most mornings in the summer  I listened for the sounds in the kitchen before throwing off the sheet, a sheet that previously had been sprinkled with water by Mother to ward off the heat and now bone dry, I contemplated beginning the day.  If I heard the rattle of pans and Mother’s footsteps crisscrossing the worn linoleum  I knew that Dad had a rare late start to the day; he was usually gone by the time either Ken or I chose to begin ours.  Those sounds meant a hot breakfast, Mother’s homemade biscuits, milk gravy, bacon, and eggs from the grouchy hens out back in the old shed they called home.  Listening in that still of an early morning, lacking those sounds, I knew it was a breakfast of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies…you know, snap, crackle and pop and that Dad was already at work. It was satisfying to me, safe and warm and as happy as a fat tick on a pudgy puppy in his bed by an old wood stove, me still under the cover of the sheet  listening for the sounds that would begin my day.

If Mother was up the wooden kitchen door was already open and the screen door was the portal of entry until lights out. The morning meal was always serenaded by the cardinals, sparrows, and other songbirds and whatever cool breezes remained lingered and gave respite to the  inevitable heat and humidity that was to come. I love the memories of those breakfasts we all had together.  It was an affirmation that everything was right in the world.

In fact supper in that little house brings the same warm fuzzies. The screen door welcomed a new serenade at dusk by frogs and crickets and often, across the  fields of yellow-gold broom sedge behind the house came the haunting, imploring trill of the whip-poor-will. I loved their echoing call. Were they lonely?  Seeking attention?  Or just celebrating a break from the heat of the summer day? 

We all ate together every meal, except for lunch which never included Dad, busy on his routes in Tennessee and Southern Illinois in the rental uniform business.  Whatever was going on, usually trivial and routine, sometimes plans and important matters in our lives, came to light as a matter of casual conversation at the kitchen and supper table.. We were integrated into each other's lives over that little, shiny-topped kitchen table.

After the supper meal, we went our separate ways until dark ran Ken and I back into the house.  The evenings were spent together in the living room in front of the T.V. watching Red Skelton, I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan, Gunsmoke, Jack Benny, Alfred Hitchcock, Dragnet and other popular shows of the time. Every single evening Mother would pop corn and bring us each a bowl and we would watch our shows for an hour, maybe a little more, laughing at the comedies and in total silence, enthralled, at the dramas, westerns, and mysteries.  Together.  

There was usually a little time before lights out to check in on the Cardinals and Harry Carey, hoping for a Stan Musial or Ken Boyer home run before  Mother came in to sprinkle down the sheets  once more.

I didn’t know what the next day would bring, but I knew we would share it together, all of us.  We were family. In every sense of the word, a family.

Sometimes I close my eyes and I am back there.  When I close my eyes for the last time, I hope I can still go back there. And to those times with my own family, wife and sons over a kitchen table. If that is heaven, that would be just fine with me.

Keith