Growing up my mom used to insist that we all come together at the table for dinner. She would play her favorite jazz and for at least thirty minutes every evening we would suspend time to the sweet serenades of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday. There are so many albums I know by taste.
I inherited my mom’s love of hosting. I love bringing my friends together for a meal. Small talk is an oxymoron. Let’s talk big, language is too beautiful to confine to pleasantry. Be rogue. We, like the sauce on our dresses, spill. We overflow, can’t / won’t fit into categories, let alone words. What’s your gender? A conversation that never ends. Where are you from? The dinner table.
Ambiance never felt like an apt enough word to describe it. It’s not just the things around us — it’s about how those things elicit something inside of us. Like stage lightning, the candles bring us into being. I think people look the most ravishing in that glow. The cinema of friends becoming strangers, secrets singing like the crickets outside. Here: night is our friend. Darkness is our home.
The table was my first stage. It’s where I learned the anatomy of an argument. Studied wit like a graduate student (so I could keep up). Learned how to tell jokes, and be the butt of them. The table is where I started to speak myself into existence. Had my first audience. Over time. And with the right people. “This is what I believe” becomes “this is who I am.”
I want to take you out to dinner & let you figure it out. Listen to all the things you aren’t supposed to say. Ask the wrong questions. Fumble through it: the discourtesy of being different people with different scars. Identity is an invitation to a table somewhere — find it. Who are you outside of what you’ve been told?
My favorite part of my birthday last month was the meals together. We seasoned that shit with our tears, peppered it with expletives. There is a Yelp review somewhere out there talking about noise we take full responsibility for. I found myself listening, just watching thinking — damn. How lucky I am to have found family in my friends.