Of Dates, Tables and Chairs

Of Dates, Tables and Chairs

 

On Saturday, Clare helped me disassemble our kitchen table.  Yesterday, I tossed the chairs, and today is the start of the high school softball season in Illinois.  And everything I just mentioned is connected.

 

The table once belonged to my parents, and it is part of my earliest memories of our kitchen on Homan Avenue.  At some point, I rescued the table out of my parents’ basement so it could do what it does best, only in our bungalow.  Ask Clare her earliest kitchen memories, and she’ll probably say they include being at that table.

 

I don’t know exactly when my mother told me the story, but it was after the table had come to us.  The story:  Pregnant with her first child—my big sister, Barbara—in early 1942, Mary Ann Bukowski decided that if the Japanese bombed the South Side of Chicago as they had Pearl Harbor, she was going to seek shelter under the kitchen table.  My jaw fairly dropped at the thought of it all.

 

But the table didn’t come to us with the original chairs.  They were lyre-backed and quite nice.  The problem was those lyres were plywood or a wood cut so thin that bits of the back had broken off; the chairs also came with some sort of vinyl or leather covering on the seats (without padding, in case you’re wondering) that had cracked.  My father either couldn’t find a replacement for the covering or had ripped it off intending for us to do without only to find the wood too rough for even-tough Bukowskis to sit on.  So out went the chairs.

 

And out went the chairs we had used for years since Clare’s junior year of high school.  I distinctly remember picking them up in late April, after a varsity game.  I checked my notes, and in the second game of a double header Clare batted third for the first time in her high school career.  It happened against New Trier, as in mighty New Trier, home of wealth and privilege.  We split on the afternoon, winning that second game in the bottom of the ninth.  My daughter had a walk-off single.

 

Those replacement chairs didn’t hold up as well as we would have wanted.  Then last week we chanced on a kitchen table and four matching chairs the same age as our other table, only the table is a little smaller, which is what I wanted.  There’s just two of us at home now, and a smaller table means less of a chance of walking into it in the middle of the night should someone get up for a drink of water.  But why did I throw out the other table?  I didn’t.

 

There are a few things going on where the two halves meet; the top is peeling away, and I want to see if a restorer can fix that.  If not, I’ll try.  When Clare found out we were getting a replacement table, she asked what we were going to do with the other one, which I didn’t know.  When she came over to help me take the table apart, I told her the story about Grandma and Aunt Barbara, which she didn’t know, and told her I wanted her to have the table if and when she moved into a house.  That, too, came as a surprise.  With luck, I’ll find four lyre-backed chairs somewhere before my daughter and her husband become homeowners.

And, like I said, today is the first official day of the high school softball season, when memories of a kind all come flooding back.