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Teaworthy

Litigator, Mediator, Writer, Photographer

Originally from Kentucky, Tiffany discovered Skirt! while studying English literature at the College of Charleston and continued following Skirt! while in law school in Georgia. Now practicing law in Lexington, she is thrilled to be part of the Skirt! community where she blogs about being mom to a ...

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Good Fortune

My favorite Chinese restaurant closed. The one where, as you order, you can watch people sitting around a wooden table in the back, cutting up vegetables and laughing. I’ve heard Ang Lee talk about how he loves kitchens because they are like stages. I love that. The family at my favorite place always looked and sounded a bit like a six-piece orchestra warming up under stage lights. The children of the family were often doing homework at one of the tables.  Jeopardy would be on a television in the corner, which made it feel like you were in someone’s home. It was the first place we walked to get take-out when we moved here.  We carried home their delicious cashew chicken and ate it out of the containers, sitting on the floor before our furniture or dishes arrived.

Years later, when our baby was tiny, we were afraid to take her out most places before her first immunizations, but we ventured there in our slouchy clothes, sleep deprived. They fed us and looked in at our baby girl sleeping in her car seat and talked about how sweet and pink she was and made us feel like we had just spent the day at Grandma’s – all loved on and full. I really miss that place. The food was excellent, but it’s like what they say about juries, they don’t remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel.

It was one of those places that was a landmark of the beginning of our marriage. Its absence now is a perfect example of why I think marriage can be such a beautiful gift: these physical places that are so full of life can disappear, but the two of you remember and bear witness to the life of the other and so it all continues to exist. That’s the good and important stuff.

My mom is a painter. Once, a friend of hers asked her to paint something for his wife who had a terminal diagnosis. He wanted something to help her remember a happier, healthier time away from chemotherapy. Mom asked him lots of great questions about his best memories with his wife. His favorite memory was when they first married, years before very successful careers. They didn’t have any money for cable TV, so they would split a beer, eat hot dogs and listen to Cubs baseball on the radio. They named their fish after Cubs players.Mom decided to paint their apartment as seen through the fish tank and painted a small Cubs hat on the aquarium floor. His wife loved it and she loved that he had remembered. I still don’t now how Mom got through the emotions it must have taken to create it, especially for a friend.

When I was in Rome 10 years ago, my friends and I arrived at a restaurant before they were open.It wasn’t anything fancy. There were fishnets hanging from the ceiling containing plastic sea creatures. But the staff were all seated at a long linen covered table eating together and telling stories. I love that they all began their shift feeling full and having first-hand knowledge of not only how the specials taste, but how the days of their co-workers had been.

On our honeymoon, we walked past a pub in London on Boxing Day. Everything was closed, but we could see a family cooking together and preparing for their dinner inside. There’s something about a family meal or even a meal of friends on display that I find so comforting. It gives this sense, false though it may be, that everyone is welcome at a table somewhere. Those are always my favorite scenes in films and books – the big meal. Eat, Pray, Love has this great scene (the only scene in the book that made me cry) when everyone gathered at the table gave Thanksgiving toasts.  I would quote it for you, but the beauty of it is about 2 pages (108-109) and it’s not fair to Elizabeth Gilbert to paraphrase.  My favorite scenes in movies like Nottinghill, Four Weddings & A Funeral, Sliding Doors, and The Four Seasons, is when you see friends gathered to eat together with the familiarity of family members.

I once heard a piece on NPR about, “refrigerator rights”.In essence, the story was that the mass appeal of Seinfeld and Friends was the familiarity of the relationships: that you could open the refrigerator of someone else as though it were your own without hesitation. That your homes were interchangeable. All blogging aside, I’m a pretty private person, so, I can’t imagine that would be the appeal of those shows for me, but it is interesting.

Maybe it’s magical to me because it feels like an occasion when people gather and eat together. It doesn’t seem so at the time when you are in it, but if you are observing, you can see its importance. It’s the making of a memory. I realize now that our Food TV obsession in my house, particularly during my maternity leave, was probably a lot about that same thing. Having virtual meals with people breaks the isolation for a while. Life seems perfectly timed and planned at someone else’s table.

Maybe it’s about a family table that can never again be reconstructed. I can never go back to the dinner table of my childhood: where one sister explained my math homework and the other French braided my hair. Where I would sit and gently pat my dog Ben with my toes as I ate. Where we would hear Mom go off on us for laughing with food in our mouths because, as she said in such a rush it came out as all one word,

“You’llChokeAndDieStopThatRightNowGarySaySomethingYouGirlsMakeMeCrazy” which, of course, made us laugh even harder.  But now, Ben is gone. Other people live in that house. Each of us are different people.

As a parent, I’m figuring out my own family table as I go along. My husband and I are improvising and trying to create something that is worth remembering, an occasion, a watermark in our lives to slow down this time a bit. And yet, I’m the one telling my daughter not to stand up in her chair because she might fall, and so on. The practicalities get in the way of magic.

She’ll probably remember something that isn’t from a day when we bring out the good dishes. It will be something out of a pizza box in the backyard or in the car on the way to the zoo. It will be cartons of Chinese food on the wood floor or hot dogs and baseball on the radio. Something simple.

Digging through an old pocket book, I found several fortunes from our favorite place.

“Every person is the architect of his or her own fortune.

Lucky numbers 20, 4, 13, 17, 22, 26.”

That one, I think I’ll keep.