VIRGINIA BEACH — When I was 11 years old, my family moved from rural Freeburg, Pa., to the nearby town of Selinsgrove, where my parents worked. This move permitted me my first job, a paper route. I managed it with the help of my mother’s basketed bicycle.
We moved in the spring. By mid-July, I was familiar with the streets and alleys that meandered throughout the small metropolis. I rolled the papers, loaded them into the bicycle basket and delivered them each afternoon. Some I threw onto porches as I peddled past. Others required me to stop and provide the paper by hand.
It was a long two-hour process. And by the end of my route, I was tired and hungry. Luckily, I was also close to home.
My last delivery led to the grass alley behind our backyard. My most vivid memory of the paper route days focuses not on deliveries but the family dinner that awaited me. The family dinner is a tradition I hold fast to today with my own family. I know from my childhood how precious that meal together can be.
We were a middle-class family, often struggling to make ends meet in a tough 1970s economy. We were in the throes of political and social change and an energy crisis that made pinching pennies a way of life.
My parents were of hardy stock, my mother the granddaughter of Italian immigrants and my father the son of a self-starter in the dairy industry. Making a little go a lot longer was a way of life for both.
My mother was resourceful and creative with food. While many nights that decade were a hamburger surprise, one night we were having pulled chicken and toasted almond salad, perfect for a hot summer evening. I picked up my pace as I peddled down the alley, eager to sit at our backyard picnic table and dig in – to the food, yes, but also to the day’s colorful stories.
That family dinner flickered in my memories this past Christmas when I sat down at the dinner table with my husband, youngest son, mother, father and stepmother. For a moment, I was back at the picnic table in Selinsgrove, listening as my parents shared their respective days, laughing and joking and – as I know now from my own experiences – expertly repressing angst at the frustrations of adult life.
My sister, brother, and I listened with rapt attention if the stories were good, and my parents’ emotions rose to the surface. We would make faces and annoy each other under the table if what they had to say bored us. My parents were of the generation taught that children are best seen and not heard, but they always asked us about our days and seemed to find our stories equally if not more interesting than their own.
We weren’t permitted books at the table, singing or picking on each other, the latter being the most difficult among siblings less than three years apart. But we were permitted opinions, and laughter was encouraged.
These dinner table features – stories, talk, repressed angst, teasing, laughter – returned on Christmas night when the people at my small gathering finished eating and leaned back. We did not rush to clear the table as soon as the forks fell. We lingered.
Strange for me to listen to my long-divorced parents tell stories of their marriage. Stranger still, I suppose, for my stepmother to laugh and chime in with stories of her own experiences with my father. That dynamic alone was enough to keep me mesmerized for hours. But what rooted me in the moment was watching my youngest son relax into his legacy, intently listening, learning and often belly-laughing with his grandparents.
We remained at the table long into the night, only rising when we decided to take a stroll around the neighborhood. While walking, I noted my father’s slowed gait. I struggled to balance my sense of time rushing past with time slowing down, as we helped it do that night at the table.
With nostalgic gratitude, I set my battered kitchen table each night. Its marred surface reflects my family’s past, present and future. Its empty seats represent my legacy. My parents taught me “at the table.” The table is where we tell our story, share values and memories, express hopes and fears, and rehash the mundane day-to-day.
It is, in all these ways, where we convey a heritage.
The author is a writer and former Virginia Beach Planning Commissioner and college professor who lives in Ashville Park. Contact her via email at leejogger@gmail.com.