My mother once told me that she bragged about me and my husband, Paul, at the senior center she frequented. “They use cloth napkins,” she said.
I momentarily wondered if that was the only nice thing Mom could think to say about us. But I know that’s not true. She enjoyed eating at our house because we always made a point of sitting down for dinner at the dining room table—with cloth napkins.
Most of the time, we reuse the napkins for several days. We each have our own, identified by a unique napkin ring. I started using cloth napkins because I thought it was an environmentally friendly thing to do. It wasn’t about elegance.
As far as sitting together at the table—well, it just seemed to me that was the way life was meant to be lived.
When Paul and I lived in a tiny, two-room apartment, we specifically bought a table at Crate & Barrel that we we could use both as a coffee table and a dining table. It was rectangular, constructed of pale oak, and had criss-crossed legs that could be lowered or raised. There was no room for a proper kitchen- or dining-room table in that flat, but we felt we needed one. This did the trick.
Now, in the home we’ve owned for 27 years, we have a dining room, with a table. The room is nothing fancy. Our place is a Victorian cottage with a double parlor. It was probably divided by folding doors or a curtain at some point (a square arch divides the rooms), but now it’s one big space. We use the front as a sitting room and the back as a dining room.
There is a built-in china cabinet in the dining room, but the bottom has been covered with bricks to form part of a hearth for a woodstove. I imagine this was done during the 1970s fuel crisis. Because we are frugal and somewhat stubborn people, we are still using that disco-era stove. Though we’ve had to spring for a new exhaust pipe and a new, very tall metal chimney along the way, the antique burner keeps bopping along.
There’s also room for a desk in the dining room, in this case another “antique.” I’m using quotes because we’re not talking Louis XIV here. The secretary belonged to one of my aunts, and probably dates to the 1930s. Finally, there is a mission-style rocker we purchased at a thrift shop early in our marriage. All in all, the dining room is really a sort of family room, although nothing like the “great rooms” that dominate modern McMansions.
In one of the corners of the arch that divides the two rooms is a small flat-screen TV on a rolling oak cart. We came up with this rather ingenious way to address the problem of 21st century living in an 1870s space. The cart is technically in the dining room, but can be rolled out and around to face the living room.
This, believe me, is much better than the huge TV that filled the corner of the living room during the previous owners’ residency.
We are only human, and when it came time to finally get a flat-screen TV, we wanted something reasonably large. Not 50 inches—that wouldn’t fit onto the cart, and would look ridiculous in any case. We settled for a 37-inch. That looked enormous to our eyes, and a bit silly on the cart. But we like watching films on DVD, and the experience was enjoyable.
We soon tore down an ancient attached shed and built a real family room/home office in its place. This obviously was the spot for the “big” TV, on a stand that was genuinely wide enough to hold it. A 21.5-inch version went onto the dining-room stand with casters, where it looks much more at home.
So there you have it—one of the reasons we don’t need to eat while sitting on the couch is that we can watch TV right from our dining table. Yes, although we use cloth napkins, we do enjoy watching the news while dining in the early evening. Is that wrong?
The family room TV isn’t hooked up to cable or satellite. We just use it to watch DVDs or Netflix. I can’t imagine setting it up just to sit uncomfortably in front of it with a plate of food. I have enough trouble getting everything in a meal ready at the same time, never mind getting Netflix streaming to cooperate with me before we can eat.
Eating in the family room is not a good idea for two reasons. One, I tend to scatter my food about when I eat. Too enthusiastic, I guess. Paul is a very neat diner, but would find the threat of dropping something on his shirt just too disturbing.
The cast of “The Big Bang,” our favorite current television series, ate on the sofa of Leonard and Sheldon’s place for many seasons. It was a big deal for them to start using dining tables at least some of the time. Although I enjoy watching them eat—with chopsticks, no less—while sitting around the coffee table, that’s never been my scene.
Our dining room table is not fancy, either. It’s hard to buy furniture for 14-by-14-foot rooms. This table once belonged to my parents. I grew up in a ranch house, and the “dining room” was divided from the kitchen by a counter. It was even smaller than our space, which is why the old table fits so perfectly.
We did get new chairs for the table, however. We mistakenly bought handsome, armed, ladder-back chairs with rush seats. Our cats made mincemeat of them. Chair cushions could only hide the damage for so long, and we’ve now replaced them with simple yet elegant entirely wooden chairs from Chilton Furniture. The cats seem content to just sleep on these.
I never intended to be hoity-toity with my cloth napkins, though I’m glad my mother felt that way when she used them. Or maybe she just felt at home. After all, she always liked to watch the news while she ate, too!
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