On the Table

Our dining table today

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but only lived there during my first three months on this planet.  Then my parents moved upstate, to the north shore of Oneida Lake, where they'd purchased a huge old farmhouse.

My father's employer wanted him closer to one of their major customers, whose base of operations was in a rural village miles from the nearest big city, Syracuse.  There were no suburbs or subdivisions.  Instead, housing options ranged from expensive lakeside cottages with beautiful views, to decrepit Victorian-era relics on overgrown lots, to the occasional defunct farmstead.

My parents managed to find a property that was a combination of the last two.

Indeed, the Beach family's farm hadn't been one for decades.  Out beyond the backyard sagged a doorless carriage shed, full to its caving rafters with rusted harvesting implements.  A hulking three-level barn almost completely collapsed a couple of winters later, after one too many epic snowbelt blizzards.  A quaint spring house, a little larger than an outhouse and literally built atop a brook, mostly housed mosquitoes.  Even as a young child, I was amazed its ancient planks of roughly-hewn lumber hadn't entirely rotted away, resting as they were in the clear, cool water where farmhands once stored metal cans full of fresh cow's milk.  

Almost all of the adjacent pastures and croplands were growing back into deep woods, and most of the main house was primitive.  Still, it had electricity and running water and a furnace, plus 130 acres of land and swamps, six bedrooms, a massive hitching post made of one solid boulder, and a picturesque stone wall, all priced just within reach of Mom and Dad's budget.  So that's where our little family relocated. 

Coming from a 3.5-room apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, my parents considered their purchase palatial in terms of space and opportunity.  And as Mom and Dad finalized the deal with its elderly owners, who were retiring to Florida, the issue of what to do with several generations of family furniture came up.  The house was packed, from its dirt-floor basement to its steeply-pitched attic, with stuff.  Some of it antique.  Most of it junk.  And all of it ancient.

Dad told the Beaches to simply take what they wanted for Florida, and leave the rest.  He and Mom would figure out what to do with it.  So that's how it came to be that Mom and Dad acquired this dining table we still have in our Texas home.

We have no proof of its age, but the Beach house was built during America's Civil War years.  During its heyday, their farm was quite large and prosperous, with a bunkhouse constructed above its kitchen and woodshed to house seasonal farmhands during spring planting and autumn harvesting.  The home's main room was approximately 18 feet by 23 feet, and this table commanded its precise center, along with the certifiably antique suspension lamp above it.

The parts of the table Mom and I use today represent the minimum configuration of its potential dimensions.  You see, back in the day, the Beaches fed many of their farmhands at this table.  Generations of Beaches were also active in church and social clubs in their north shore community, and longtime family friends of the Beaches who visited Mom and Dad after they'd purchased the place told them they used to attend events when this table was stretched out to its fullest - and laden with food for everybody.

So, how large can this table become?  Well, underneath each semi-circular end section are stored a series of extender bars that, when expanded, allow for up to ten - yes, TEN! - leaves, or wood extensions.  Those leaves are stored in their own custom-made case, which we keep in the garage.  Each leaf measures approximately 16" wide, although one of them appears to have been crafted as a replacement, because it's not stained like the others.  Combined with each end section (which together measure 50 inches across), the entire length of the maxed-out table would be a whopping 210 inches, or 17.5 feet!

Very little impresses my jaded self anymore, but that does!

Obviously, for the fully-extended table to fit inside the Beach's main room, it would have had to be set up diagonally, but in an 18 x 23 foot space, that could be done.  Alternatively, it could have been set up on the lawn without any problem.  Or along the main house's front covered porch, which spanned the entire facade, between two enormous pine trees.  

While we've had it, my family has never extended the table out to its fullest capacity.  But last night, I had the crazy idea to try it here in our far smaller house.  We have a wide space between our front and back living areas, and I cleaned each leaf in preparation for the big demonstration.  I did the pulling; Mom stood against one of the ends to hold it in place, while I slowly eased my end further and further away.  

The first bit of work went smoothly, since we've used one or two leaves many times over the years, depending on family visits.  We only downsized to the two end parts after Dad died, when neither Mom nor I could bear looking at all that empty table space with even one extra leaf in it.  

As I carefully pulled backwards, at every step watching each extension slide silently into place, I marveled at the table's lack of modern mechanization - only well-crafted dove-tail slots.  To my untrained eye, it represents some surprising engineering, especially for its day.  

And alas, yes; the table is old.  At least 100 years old, and probably more like 150.  It's all wood - and only wood, no grease.  And the poor thing... try as I might, after a while, I just couldn't coax those extenders into extending anymore.  They've been dormant for so long, discreetly swelling and contracting with variations in humidity and ambient temperature both in upstate New York and here in Texas.  And I didn't want to risk breaking anything - after all, this is still our daily-use dining table.

We have a custom-made support for the extended leaves that I stuck underneath, because we did get it pulled apart for quite a distance.  And all that heavy, old-growth wood starts to sag quickly, even without being fully extended.  I only managed to get four leaves added, but I was still impressed.  

When fully extended, just imagine how many people would be able to sit at this same table for the same meal!  I'm guessing that with chairs comfortably spaced around it, up to 22 people could all sit down together - and probably even more, if elbow room wasn't a priority.

Nevertheless, how practical is it for that many people to sit and dine all around the same table?  I got to thinking about dinner parties I've attended, where guests may not even be seated at a main table, but throughout our host's home, in different corners and rooms.  Not just because most homeowners today don't have gargantuan dining tables and dining rooms, but because, frankly, it's impractical to sustain one contiguous conversation among 22 people for very long.  People naturally mentally detach from a group that size and focus their discussions among only two or three of each other at a time.  With so many different discussions happening around the same table, I imagine it could become distracting, and compromise efficient communication.

Meanwhile, post-meal clean-up likely was easier with such a big dining table.  Only one tabletop to clear, only one floor to sweep.  Plus, mobile, munching human guests didn't leave crumbs all over the entire house for animal and insect intruders to find later!  

Mom says the fully-stocked Beach family linen closet included at least one homemade tablecloth big enough for the fully-extended table, but she had to dispose of it years ago because it had severely degraded from age.

If you've been studying the photos so far, you'll notice that in addition to our old-fashioned table, there's an old-fashioned lamp hanging from our ceiling.  That is the original ceiling lamp from the Beach home, and it's hung over that table probably as long as the table has been around.  

Originally, it was a kerosene lamp, and its cut-glass reservoir remains intact.  Also intact are its original glass globe and delicate, bell-shaped smoke collector dangling from the fixture's top.  It's made of incredibly thin white glass, and is missing from most lamps of similar vintage because of its fragility.  When kerosene was burned to create the flame for the lamp's light, smoke would waft upwards and the bell shape would ostensibly collect most of it before it reached the ceiling and discolored it.

Suspended above the glass lampshade you'll see a crown-shaped ring.  That ring serves as a counter-balance so the fixture's lamp can be raised and lowered to bring light closer to the table.  Remember, it was made long before task lighting.  When my parents bought the Beach's house, this lamp had already been electrified.  Last year, I updated it on the advice of a friend who recommended replacing its aging electrical socket with a minimalist pendant bulb.

So what would it look like with all 10 of those leaves arranged as if they were in the table frame?  I laid them all out in a row on the floor, with the odd one in the middle.  I put blank sheets of copy paper underneath each corner to help provide a better visual impact.

Because of the markings from damage across it, I'm guessing the unstained leaf served as the middle because that damage approximates where the custom-made support could have been.  Being a farm table, perhaps it didn't necessarily matter if all the leaves were the same size and color, especially if, as was fashionable then, tablecloths were draped over them all.

What you see there is an eating surface 13.3 feet long.  And when everybody goes home, extendable supports for all of that eating surface slide alongside each other, and nest discreetly back underneath the circular table in the top photo.  How cool is that?

Now, can you imagine how much food it took to feed everybody who was sitting all around it?

Good thing it was a farm table, right?  Back then, farm-to-table was no esoteric or artisanal hipster trend, or marketing gimmick.  Farms were the places from which real people got their real food.  From the fields they'd been tending all around the house.  And the cows and chickens in that huge barn.

The diminutive round table on which Mom and I dine today may not be impressive or distinctive to the casual observer.  But we know better.  Ours is a table rich in potential, and a keeper of stories we'll never know... told by lots of people we've never met who once dined around it.

Almost certainly, none of those people were royalty or potentates or captains of industry.  Oneida Lake's north shore has never been exclusive.  Still, throughout the history of human existence, far beyond the woods and lakes of upstate New York, the centrality of eating, dining, and the communal "breaking of bread" has been a constant, regardless of geography, culture, or social status.

What our table's history lacks in pretentiousness it makes up for in hospitableness.  As long as what's served on it is wholesome, and the people gathered around it benefit from each other's company, that's what counts, right?

So as we say here in Texas, "Bone appa teet, y'all!"

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