Ad mensam | Stories | Notre Dame Magazine

Whimsical blue watercolor illustration of a child sitting at a table reaching for a doll offered by a hand from above. The scene includes a checkered floor with images of food, a soccer ball shooting across the sky like a comet, and a wrapped gift. — Illustration by Hayley Potter

My parents are giving away their kitchen table.

My parents are giving away their kitchen table, and I’m being an enormous baby about it.

The thing is, it’s about time they gave that table away. They have owned it for over 20 years, which is about as long as my father has wished they could redo their kitchen and upgrade it.

In their imminent and well-deserved remodeling, there will not be a table in the same spot where our old table sits now. I thought about that as I sat in my unassigned assigned seat at the table for the last time before it is given away, about how I would never again sit in that precise spot or have that exact view of the downstairs level of my parents’ home.

I thought about it, even as I realized that that view has changed over the years, many times, as my legs grew long enough for my feet to touch the floor, or during my teen years, when I spent most nights in that seat being told to sit up and stop slouching, and how by the time I reached my adult height (nothing to write home about, a mere 5 feet, 4 inches), I had already moved out of my parents’ house and no longer sat in that seat often enough to consider the shift in my vantage point.

Still, as I sat in that seat for the last time, I thought about all the times I had sat there before. Even though I am a different person now than the little girl I once was, for a moment, everything felt the same, like I was sitting in that chair after soccer practice, grateful my mother had let me eat dinner without first having to remove my socks and shin guards and shower.

I saw a million memories at that table, most of them mundane, but all as real to me as if I were 12 years old again, waiting for my siblings to come downstairs so I could eat.

I saw myself sitting eating mac and cheese in sixth grade while I thought about a poem I wanted to write about a boy I met at play rehearsal. (I never actually wrote the poem. My 11-year-old mind came to its senses . . . and moved on to another boy, also from play rehearsal.)

I saw the time I sat there, in second grade, trying to avoid spilling my V8 and hastily microwaved instant oatmeal on the stark, white shirt of my school uniform, thinking enviously about my classmates who were probably eating Lucky Charms and orange juice at their own kitchen tables, while Lucky Charms in my house were relegated to birthdays only.

I opened birthday gifts in that chair: CDs, T-shirts and, once, a porcelain doll I still have even though I was 6 when I received it and it is missing one porcelain hand due to an unfortunate drop on the tile floor. In a photo of me somewhere, I am half standing up from my seat at that table, reaching for the doll as my sister held and admired it.

I sat at that table while studying toward my master’s degree, cramming through the night for a Latin midterm during the hot, indoor summer of the pandemic in 2020. I sat then in my usual chair, but I didn’t swing my feet like I used to. Instead, I but rather let them cool on the tile floor while I attempted to learn declensions I should have understood during the first week of the course.

I’ve gotten in trouble in that seat many times, generally for taking way too long to eat miscellaneous good-for-you foods that I wish I’d learned to like but still don’t touch as an adult.

I’ve been ejected from that seat by an order to go to my room. (Also more than once. Unfortunately, that never seemed to happen on the same nights I was trying to avoid eating the good-for-you foods. And so it goes.)

Sitting in my chair for the last time, alone, I thought about the faces I could still see sitting around me — my four siblings, in their own unassigned assigned seats, and the time my mother thought we were old enough to add our own sugar to our morning oatmeal, until she saw how liberal our self-monitored servings were and revoked our privileges.

I saw my siblings’ birthdays, all of us in party hats, which, between the five of us, must have featured every single licensed character offered by Party City over the years.

I saw my maternal grandfather eating a grilled cheese sandwich.

I saw my paternal grandmother, sewing up my favorite jacket when I was in eighth grade, after she noticed that I had ripped the pocket. (I ripped the pocket on nearly every jacket I owned in those days, due to my nervous habit of shoving my fists in my pockets with excessive force. I never ripped that pocket again after she patiently fixed it from her seat at the head of that kitchen table, though that nervous habit remains.)

I saw cousins at Thanksgiving and college friends who visited in the summer and my childhood best friend, who sat across from me eating frozen pizza on the Halloween of my senior year of high school, before we went trick-or-treating despite being way too old to do so.

Despite the fact that this table has been around so long that I can hardly remember the one that came before it, I’ve hardly ever seen it. My parents put a table pad over it, and it earned all the stains that five children could cause a table to earn, as well as streaks of paint and permanent marker and the little holes caused by the tongs of a fork pushed down just to see if it would leave a mark.

Beneath that pad stands an unblemished table. I’ve seen glimpses of it, having lifted one edge of the pad just to look at the smooth, clean, pale wood underneath, but I have never eaten a meal directly on that spotless table, and now I never will.

Behind my chair is the light switch. Two switches, actually. Flipping it became one of my tasks upon sitting down to dinner. Despite the thousands of meals I ate sitting in that chair, turning the light on and off, I couldn’t tell you offhand which switch turns on the light over the table and which turns on the light on our back porch. Every night was a game of guess-and-check.

Given all the time I’ve spent at that table, I guess I still don’t know it — that seat, that spot — that well.

I probably won’t spend much time dwelling on the table when it’s gone, and even on its last night in our home, I know that. In fact, I’ll probably marvel over the new table my parents pick out, whenever it arrives. I wonder if they’ll trust us enough not to order a table pad, now that we’re all grown up.

In a way, I hope they don’t. That stained table pad is the piece of the old table I do know. It’s where the memories are recorded, where the fingerprints of family life remain. I wouldn’t mind messing up a new one, getting the chance to leave our mark on it like we did on the old one.

I don’t know the family that’s getting our old table, but I hope they love it like we did. I hope they build enough memories around it that their middle daughter might sit for a while, the night before they get rid of it — be that in 20 months or 20 years — and savor the moments she had there.

I hope they love the dark green wood — my favorite color — of the chairs.

I hope they replace the red cushions, which have, by now, lost most of their cushion.

And I hope, now and then, even just for a minute, even if it’s just a corner, they lift the pad and marvel at the clean, smooth wood beneath it.

Then, I hope they put the pad back down on the table where it belongs and christen it with a new ink stain, a new story to look back on, cherish and have a minor meltdown about when that table once again finds a new home.

Rebecca Hammock’s essay won first place in this magazine’s 12th annual Young Alumni Essay Contest — the Schaal Prize, named for former managing editor Carol Schaal ’91M.A. Hammock majored in marketing and theology before pursuing graduate studies at Notre Dame and Boston College. She lives in San Diego, where she teaches at an all-boys high school.