After a year in the dining room, it’s finally time to move on

Even though they are both gone from this earth, I spent the last year sitting at the dining room table with my parents. That used to be something I dreaded, formal family meals with each of them sitting properly at opposing heads of the table, grilling three boys on topics such as Richard Nixon and the state of our country. But also the flicking of elbows and constant demand to sit up straight.

“Haven’t we taught you good manners?”

There weren’t enough moon landings to balance out conversations about politics. Three assassinations, a pointless war and countless Beatles albums passed as we came together for little more than fifteen minutes a day, just enough time to eat, clear, and begin life’s journey.

“Can we be excused?” the only question we wanted answered, so we could get back to Star Trek or Gilligan’s Island.

“You should come watch it too,” we’d say… as if.

Even more terrifying than being asked what we thought of the war in Vietnam, was the prospect of being asked about school.

“What did you learn today?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I don’t remember.”

We’ve had the conversation at with our two children. They focused on social media and on-line games the way we focused on sports.

“Dad, you should check-out Fortnite. It’s cool,” Ben & Nicole say the same way I used to talk about the ’69 Mets.

“Can we talk about something else? Anything?” my mom would finally blurt out after the three of us finished reporting on all the games we’d either watched or played in the last twenty-four hours. Here we were, sitting at the table with a New York Times journalist, and a former magazine editor studying for her masters in education, and all I could talk about was the pathetic knuckle ball that I’d somehow bribed my younger brother into catching.

“Did you see that?” I’d cry out when it left my hand, the two of us reading laces telling of the ball’s lack of rotation and propensity to knuckle. More like knuckle head.

One year ago this week, I left the place I’ve worked for the last twenty eight years, arriving home to lay my laptop down on the dining room table where it remains to this day, though I’m threatening to finally move upstairs.

“You’re loud,” Mary’s said on more than one occasion. “And it would be nice to have the first floor back.”

I’ve spent five days a week over the last year surrounded by the memory of my parents, not because they ever lived in this house, but because much of the art and furniture in this room once belonged to them, and because I remember those meals with surprising clarity.

There’s the clock that once sat on my grandmother’s mantel in Baltimore, and then in my parents’ New York apartment. My mom’s silver candle snuffer. Paintings of a Brooke family homestead in Virginia.

A picture of my father taking in a Cape Cod League baseball game, along with a black and white photo of two people walking in Central Park after a storm. Before he died, he described his love and great desire to again walk in the park with new snow blanketing the city.

There’s the incredible illustration of Manhattan by Mary’s cousin. A cupboard filled with family heirloom glassware. A porcelain pitcher whose visage reminds me of my mother, a character to the shape, a spirit to mimic her joie-de-vivre. Brass candle sticks, a painted scene from the Maine coast by my grandfather, antique chairs.

“Early attic,” a friend calls our house’s interior design. Not wrong, but hard to hear. We’ve not designed anything, just acquired.

At no time did I expect to spend the year in this room with my parents. Such is pandemic life. We make do. Manage video conference calls. Write emails. Keep sane.

“What do you plan to do with your life?” the inevitable question coming from my father when looking at whatever report card made it to his end of the table.

“Leave me alone,” I’d think but never say, fighting back tears.

I didn’t have plans back then, and none of us can really plan much these days either. Moving day-by-day, thinking about the state of the world, missing my parents, though feeling their presence.

“I’m glad Dad didn’t live to see this pandemic,” my younger brother John says on a call with me and our older brother Jim. “He’d have hated being cooped up in his apartment for a year.”

“You’re right. And how about those Celtics, I think we beat your Nets last night!?!”