2021 March – You wait to choose your moment perfectly. The timing is critical around this dinner table. The excitement of your family gathering charges everyone up. The booze from happy hour intensifies the joy and the red-faced storytellers around the room. The energy carries over into a celebratory dinner, moments of raised wine glasses, praises to the chefs, stories, debates, and even some softer sentiments… words of remembrance for your recently passed father. This is why you’re here, back home where you began in Rochester, NY, sharing your time, reconnecting with immediate family. The days have turned into weeks as you all heal and grieve together. Sadness gives way to fondness, and disorientation gives way to your roots in family gathering. The celebrations continue each day, big and small. Sometimes in the small family cell around the Carreo family table of your youth. Sometimes out to dinner, using your shared grief as an excuse to pause on pandemic caution. Sometimes with your extended family and Rochester remaining cousins. Each time a little different, each time a little familiar.
Tonight, you are at your Uncle Bob and Aunt Janet’s home, a warm home, a family familiar one from your childhood. It’s your mom’s big brother, and they shared a great fondness for your dad, offering the richest stories and sentiments to fill the hole in your heart. There is magic here and connection, and somehow the whole night feels continuous with the nights before. You can predict the energies, the stories told, and who the spotlight will turn to next. You know your own part to play, your waxing and waning spotlight as you shift from regaling story teller to curious listener.
And as the dinner table starts to exhale deeply into a calm sigh, you sense a few crossroads. Either someone claims the next spotlight, as you sink deeper into your chair, losing your attention span and retreating to your quiet recharge mode. Or we all snap into busy bee mode simultaneously, scrambling to collect dishes, dueling politeness with insistence to help, as we arm wrestle over each other in a small kitchen to all lend a hand, preferring to stay in motion over being the odd man out. Or you devise a third option, and play the room like a poker table. You strike first, careful not to choose the wrong moment, too soon or too late. Careful not to invite chaos or discordant politeness. Confident enough to set a course that all could follow.
You push back from the table, with both hands flat down, and say strongly, “I would like to clear, please, stay seated and keep talking, I won’t do much”. The small hesitations, the stuttered resistance, and then a wash of relief from our hosts to say, “Ok, but don’t clean up too much, we’ll serve dessert soon.”
This is where you shine, this is when you feel most at ease. An opportunity to take a break from the loud energy, a chance to recharge with busy work on your own and without retreating to introversion. A chance to offer service and kindness to keep a better relaxed harmony at the table. Naturally, you do more than you explain, but the ruse was well played. You bring the stack of plates around the back doors of the kitchen, you turn up Alexa’s jazz playlist loud… partly to muffle the loud clanking pots and pans, and partly to give yourself a playlist while you jam away, dancing your dance of labor.
And you recall all the times when you’ve been in this exact same position with family. The night before even with your dad’s sister’s family. Two nights before with your sister Julie’s and husband Adam’s gourmet cooking. One week ago, with my sister Jennie’s family nestled around our old family Carreo table. Last Christmas, with Mom and Dad alone. Two summers ago, after a large family sunny deck party at our house. And backwards through time until before you can remember.
Before even the summer job you had as a busboy and pan scrubber at Hedge’s restaurant, on your feet every night, sweating it out for under-the-table beer money. Those upstate NY summer nights working at this fine dining lakefront establishment were formative, watching each night as that grand restaurant came alive with candlelight, live piano jazz and special dinner guests crowding the bar and dance floor before being seated to their special dinner table, their own perfect moment.
Each night there was a swell of a magic, ambiance, connection and fleeting pursuits of joy. Each night, there was that slow wind down, dispersion, scramble to close and clean up. And each night, you marveled to watch this shift, as you shifted from the early night boisterous engagement to the quieter times scrubbing those pots and pans.
This is how it’s been ever since, and this is where you find your personal retreat. Your chance to show gratitude for evening, the many hands that brought food to our table, near and far. The chance to contribute in some meaningful way, in your presence, but also in your conducting harmony at the table, so that those involved may enjoy each other’s presence.
Before you know it, you’re getting hollered to come back to the table and share the dessert. You snap out of your jazz induced trance, and look around to find the dishwasher fully loaded and cookware all stacked and rinsed. You may have done too much, maybe you lingered too long, but you rejoin the table with a revived energy and raise one more glass. We sit together joyously at this table, and you feel the time warping around it, as if it is every table you’ve ever known to be with family and friends.
You feel the presence of each personality, the many hands, the thousand smiles. And in that moment, you see the face of your father sitting right beside you, smiling deeply, and here with you today and all the days forward.
Paul Carreo 