At The Table
January 13, 2024
By Tuesday night the change in weather arrived. The morning snow gave way to rain, which spattered against my windshield in the dark drive home. The wind gusted and buffeted. Any time outside was brief, with shoulders hunched against the unfriendly atmosphere.
After I locked up the chicken coop for the night I walked back across the sodden yard, boots squishing in slushy snow as I listened to the wind moan and rush through the tall pines along the border of the property. In the night the sound was both mournful and wild, speaking of things coming, things changing. The call was uncomfortable, and at the same time thrilling, in its restlessness.
In contrast to the wildness of the night, inside it was warm, bright, and dry. There is a special pleasure in stocking a wood stove in such times. The coals raked, the fresh wood shoved in, and the revived flames speak of a bulwark against uncertainty. There is assurance and comfort.
Supper was home made pizza, something which my wife has grown in her perfections of making over the years of our marriage. I don’t know if it was the weather, the food, or something else, but I was feeling particularly thankful as we all gathered around the dinner table.
The pizza with fresh onion from our garden caught my attention, and taste buds. The wet autumn had made plenty of onions start to rot in the field before harvest and I had been afraid that nearly our entire harvest would spoil. But I sorted the onions as best I could and the remainder have been holding up decently well. The pizza sauce was home made, with garlic from our garden, then the mozzarella and a bit of scattered pepperoni, topped with the thinly sliced onion. The onion provided the kick of taste, the best I can describe it as fresh and sharp, elevating the flavor of the entire combination of the pizza.
I could easily have eaten far too much. I probably did eat a little too much.
We were eating and talking and my mind was wandering over various ideas (as it is wont to do). At some point in the evening I pondered local grown food versus imported and argued both sides to myself. On the one hand, there is goodness in what is grown local, even down to what is pulled from the earth of your own back yard. But also there is a goodness in buying from others. There is a spirit of generosity in that exchange, the hospitality and open-heartedness of offering what is ours to others. To understand that truth you only need to consider times in history of great warfare. There is no sharing of food then. The world shrinks into a cage of animosity and violence so that each hoards what is his own. The doors are shut. If you recognize this, then you can see how food enjoyed from far and wide has a certain implicit kindness so easily overlooked.
My thoughts drift to the work day. There was an episode of “story time” in the morning, when the nurses sat around at the start of shift and reminisced. Somehow the topic of preferred places to work came up and my boss opined that he preferred working the Trauma floor because there was less paperwork and things were simpler. I will say this is a matter of perspective, but since his first career had been twenty years as a police officer it is understandable that he was not as bothered by the harder aspects of working Trauma.
As I chewed my pizza I mulled over three of his harrowing stories. In the background the children munched and crunched. The first story was about the man who came in with a hammer claw embedded in his skull, the result of a fight. The man was conscious and talking so when the physician walked in the room the doctor said, “Well, clearly it isn’t in his brain,” and promptly began wiggling the hammer back and forth until it came lose.
The second story was about a lady who had her hand caught in an industrial accident with a mold press. “I’ve never seen anyone in so much pain,” my boss said. “When she was conscious her entire body shook from the pain. The hand was completely flattened.” There was nothing that could be done to save it, and the hand had to be amputated.
The third story was about a car accident where a man was brought into the hospital with a steering column embedded in his abdomen. The firefighters had cut the steering column out of the car and brought the man in with the car part sticking out of him. “That was before the days of airbags,” my boss mused.
All three people survived their trauma.
Pondering such stories provokes a strange sensation of dis-junction, as if the world has bifurcated into two realities. Here I am in my dining room with the family gathered around, enjoying fresh garlic and onion with cheese and thick tomato sauce over a crispy crust. The children talk about their day in between bites of food, a warm relaxed chatter. It is a picture of domestic tranquility and yet simultaneously within my head (and outside beyond the rain and darkness) there exist a world of pain and anger and brokenness. It is all tangled together, without easy explaining, and it feels impossible to reconcile the existence of both—as if one must be nothing more than a dream in the face of the reality of the other. Perhaps there is the fear that domestic peace is but the dream, one day to be woken from as it is devoured by the wild black beast of reality. I don’t know what to do with that. Be thankful for what I have, I suppose. That is a start.
Today there is good pizza and a happy family. Here there is the goodness of gathering around the table, eating together in life and togetherness. These things are so much absent from this age and culture. Aloneness is like darkness. Both consume you.
And so after reading two more chapters from The Wingfeather Saga, the children are packed off to bed. They still have the Christmas lights strung around the room, the multicolored ambiance the accompaniment to which they can drift off to sleep. Later I come in and shut off the lights.
Outside the rain drips through the night and the wind sighs a song about sorrow unspeakable.