One Small Voice: Dining set tells Thanksgiving history

The massive, Victorian dining room furniture had been in the house at the Jersey shore since the house was bought in 1940, but the furniture actually dated from the 1920s, when Grandpa and Grandma Richards were married and furnished their first house in Newark.

It consisted of a dining table that extended to seat 10, a large sideboard, an equally substantial china cabinet, and six heavy chairs. It had been  much lighter colored furniture when new, but as old furniture finishes tended to do, the varnish had taken on a very dark patina.  The pieces were heavily ornamented in Art Nouveau relief, with beautifully carved drawers and cupboard doors. The table had a support piece underneath that acted as ornament, foot rest, and structural engineering to brace the weight of the table top. The chair backs were carved with numerous openings that included four large holes near the top just large enough for children to stick their hands through.

The house at the shore had stayed in the family since the ’40s, but an encroaching hospital prompted my Aunt Shirley to part with the homestead around 1973.  Wanting to take very little of the contents with her to Florida, Shirley generously opened the house to all family to take what they wanted.

The only thing I wanted was that dining room set, and I thought everyone would have the same, intense, sentimental attachment I did. But it seemed that I was the only one of 11 cousins crazy enough to traipse all the way from Pittsburgh with my new husband and a U-Haul trailer to bring the white elephant back to our two-room apartment.

I loved, and still love, that massive set of furniture. It has so many memories absorbed into the tree-trunk table legs, and the Pilgrim stocks of the chair backs.  The center drawer of the sideboard holds the taste memory of purloined Whitman Sampler chocolates that my Grandpa “hid” in there with mothballs. The stolen candy never tasted quite right, but we stole them anyway.

The bottom cupboard of the china cabinet held a shoe box of tiny ceramic animals and other miniatures.  I can’t calculate the hours we spent creating playtime stories with the dogs and horses and such from that box. The table itself was excellent indoor playground equipment for rainy days at the shore. It became a fort or cave or tent when covered by blankets. We could be cave people, or wild Indians (it was the unenlightened ’50s), or part of a wagon train crossing the country.

But the best memories of all come from Thanksgivings around that big old table with the leaves pulled out. Some years it was the adult table, and the kids were consigned to the kitchen. Some years it became the children’s table, when the adults convened in the warm, cozy kitchen. Regardless of whose table it was, I can still see Grandpa, in a white shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, standing at the head of the table to carve the bird. If we were lucky, we had helped Grandma stuff and butter that bird. Grandpa said grace, and we ate heartily of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, squash and turnips, green beans and corn, and all kinds of pie, from apple to pumpkin to mincemeat.

I can’t remember, in all of the years we gathered there, that there was ever arguing or disagreement or family tension. We were always so glad to be together with aunts and uncles and cousins who we never saw enough of. It was noisy – very noisy – punctuated with off color jokes and raucous laughter, and we knew about conversational multi-tasking long before the word was coined.

The memories are so strong and wrap themselves around me so tightly that I have

prevailed through our four moves to take that dining room set with us, each house requiring the space to give it the room it deserves. From New Jersey to Arizona, as with pioneers before us who took the things most precious to them over mountains and across deserts and plains, Grandma’s dining room set has made it out west  by way of Eisenhower’s vast interstate highway system.

It has never again had the kind of gathering it did when Grandma hosted the whole clan at the shore. My sisters and cousins still marvel that we have held on to this  monstrosity. My husband and sons wonder why they indulge me in dragging it from home to home. But I am so glad that we have kept it.

In my mind’s eye there will always be a Capra-esque scene muted in a haze of memory, Norman Rockwell Americana, but with a twist of Ron Howard’s Parenthood. And at the center of it all is this dining room table and chairs on the most American of holidays, Thanksgiving.

May your American holiday be as blessed as ours was and continues to be, with the living around you, and the departed among you in memory. May it be noisy and amiable, with an abundance of too much everything.

Happy Thanksgiving.