The Times

What Ever Happened to the Dining-Room Table?

BY JOSEPH N. BELL It used to be a family forum, morning, noon, and night... and it still can be, if SEVERAL YEARS AGO my wife and I came to the conviction that a dining room might help us recapture some of the grace and solid values that we found ourselves missing in this generation of family living. We were also seeking a means of re-establishing lines of family communication, which had become frayed and uncertain. In the confusion and bustle of split-level living, somehow we seemed unable to find either the time or the opportunity to sit and listen to our three children, so that we were becoming virtual strangers to one another. I still remember with shame the day one of our neighbors, who had a daughter in our son's class, congratulated us on his nomination as class president. We didn't even know about it. When we questioned him that evening, he shrugged and said, "I dunno. Everybody just seemed to be so busy all the time that I never got a chance to tell you." Searching our own childhood for clues to better communications, my wife and I found that we both associated family activities with the dining room. We remembered our childhood dinin_ rooms as eternally populated—with relatives, children, friends. There was always an exchange of ideas going on, and not just among adults. Children were listened to in our dining rooms—listened to with kindness and patience and understanding. There seemed little time for leisurely listening in our own home. Meals were usually hurried and disjointed; casual dinner guests posed all sorts of logistical problems; and a large family dinner meant a series of card tables scattered about the house, giving it the appearance of a night club—with about the same potentialities for group conversation. When we had something we wanted to discuss with the children, we found it difficult to get them together and hold their attention once we had them. And I am sure they experienced the same difficulties with us. In this situation, my wife and I determined to try to offer our children a reasonable facsimile of the sort of family forum we had known. Two things were lacking: the dining room and a suitable table to go in it. Neither was easy to find. We quickly discovered that in newly constructed houses the dining room is apparently equated in cost with an indoor-swimming pool. But we found a rich vein of dining rooms in older houses, and we finally bought one with a dining room larger than the living room. The search for an adequate dining-room table took almost as long. "What we're looking fo:, I would tell the furniture salesman, "is a maple table that will open to 110 inches. We don't want it to convert into a coffee table, or anything else. We just want a plain, ordinary, sturdy, cumbersome dining-room table." The salesman, frowning at this persistent nonsense, would reply testily: "People don't buy those anymore. They've been out-of-date for years." AFTER WEEKS OF SHOPPING, we found just what we were looking for in a secondhand store and bought it on the spot. At first, like the children, my wife and I regarded the dining room somewhat self-consciously. Perhaps, we thought, we should reserve it for state occasions—dinner parties and family holidays. Then, happily, we undertook some extensive re-modeling in our kitchen and had to move to the dining room for our evening meals. At first, we felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if wearing a too-well-starched shirt. Then gradually a subtle change began to take place. We discovered that the grace we've always asked the children to say before meals somehow sounded less perfunctory and more appropriate around the

12 Suburbia Today, March 1961