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10/12/2008

Each evening, about 6 o'clock, my mother would stand at the kitchen stove, serving supper. She would put one piece of chicken, meat loaf or fish on a plate and hand it to Rita, who handed it off to Eileen, who handed it over to Kenny, who gave it to Bud, who passed it around to Jim, who placed it in front of my father.

This ritual went on until all five boys and three girls and my mother had food before them. It was like a scene from an actor's boarding house that was played out in the kitchens of millions of homes in America.

It was the era of Roosevelt. America was climbing out of the gutter and then, as now, the kitchen table was the center of our universe. It was, naturally, the warmest room in the house and had the best lighting. Our table was the old round captain's table. It never saw a tablecloth, not even at supper. It was too prone to gravy stains, spilled coffee and, sometimes, tears.

We all did homework at that same table. My mother and father worked out the insurance payments and grocery money there. Charlie Klein proposed to my sister over cups of Folger's Coffee and orange Jell-O at that table. It was there that my mother worked out my father's funeral arrangements as I stood in the doorway, listening, and watched the light go out of her eyes.

We colored Easter eggs there, carved the Halloween pumpkins and put picture puzzles of Frederic Remington's "The Smoke Signal" together on long winter nights. It was at all of our kitchen tables, wooden at first, then Formica and back to wooden, where ideas were born, futures planned and dreams shaped, and where the dream sometimes died.

It was at that table my mother spread out the afternoon Post-Dispatch and scanned the news of the war in the Pacific, where four of her sons floated between life and death.

Now, when the world is lighted by lightning, the kitchen table has returned to sharper focus. It is, in the words of the great Norma Desmond, "ready for its close-up."

That small, warm, mythical island that, for decades since the Great Depression, has housed the Technicolor, bubble-gum-scented world of "The Brady Bunch," "Ozzie and Harriet" and Desi and Lucy has returned to center stage in an unfolding drama of darker tones and Orwellian proportions. It is a new kitchen for a new generation, a room where new ideas are struggling to be born, where futures are being put on hold and dreams are in danger of dying.

It's 6 o'clock in America.

Supper is ready, and cloudy skies we thought would never come back are lowering above our houses. All of us who sit around this new kitchen table are finally being called upon to participate in the building of a brave new world.

It's time to set the table for feast or prepare for famine. It's time to set the table.

J.P. Devine is a freelance writer living in Waterville.

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