That Ugly Formica Table

I have been having a particularly stressful few weeks this past month and was contemplating it all on my way to work this morning.  Nothing major, just basic life stuff like flat tires, employee woes, house renovations and work stress, all of which you can add the suffix #firstworldproblems to.  No matter how trivial they all seem, the culmination of them all at once had me desperately searching my memory bank for my quieter, simpler “happy place”.

And out of the blue I found it: my grandparent’s Formica kitchen table.

You know the kind of table – the one with the wobbly tin legs that is a mixed colour or barf green and fecal brown that matches perfectly with any orange corduroy couch.  The kind that has cigarette burn marks on it and a wrap around metal piece that lifts off around the edges.   The kind that signifies for me hours and hours of card games, lovingly made grandma meals and late night surprise snacks.

This morning, I could think of nothing better than the simplicity of life when I was young and used to spend entire weekends sitting around this ugly table.

I had never really taken the time to think long and hard about my visits to my grandparents’ house.  They were a regular part of my childhood, and always something I looked forward to.   Theirs was a simple bungalow with décor and appliances that matched beautifully with this god-awful Formica table.  My Grandpa’s high tech stereo system played non-stop 88.1 cheesy soft listening music and it was there that I got introduced to such greats as Carly Simon, Neil Diamond and saxophone jazz.

In hindsight now its seems CRAZY to me that my grandmother never had ANYTHING better to do ALL weekend other than play cards with me.  I used to wait impatiently at the bathroom door for what seemed like HOURS for her to get ready in the morning.  (This was probably about as stressful as my weekend would get.)  FINALLY after a few jokes about “not falling in the toilet” (that had me on the floor in peals of laughter every time) my grandma would emerge and the card games would start.

We only ever played one game: Mexican Poker.  And I know for a fact that it is not just my retrospective memory that makes me believe we played it incessantly; we did.  We played for hours in the morning until Grandma had to get up to make lunch.  After calling Grandpa in, we then sat at around the table and ate cheese dreams or tuna sandwiches and banana muffins.  My grandpa and his dentures could win a contest for the slowest eater in the world.  Unfortunately his slow eating also paired with a robust appetite so I would often have to sit for a good 30-60 minutes after finishing my own meal, listening to the sounds of his dentures clickety clacking as he calmly and thoroughly chewed his cheese dream and then patiently scraped every last speck of muffin off the muffin wrapper with his Swiss army knife.

As soon as lunch was done and Grandpa was back out puttering in the garage, the cards would come out again and the game would resume.  We played so hard we sometimes forgot to get dinner ready on time.  We played so hard we had cramps in our hands from shuffling.  Over time we established brilliant theories on how cards started to arise in sequence if you played for long enough and finally had to resort to getting a proper card shuffler to ensure accuracy and relieve our sore hands from the monotonous duty.

We played so hard that one night when the clock struck 11pm Grandma poked her head up from her hand and realized for the first time that evening that Grandpa was missing.  She quickly went from competitive card mode to flat out panic when she also realized it was 11pm and WAY past my bedtime.  I THINK we might have also forgotten about dinner, too.  We searched the house high and low for Grandpa but he was nowhere to be found.  Grandma assumed the worst, “Oh SHIT, Lyssie,” she said with her gold teeth gleaming deamonously, “I think we’re in big trouble.”

It was right then that we heard the front door open and in walked Grandpa who had gone out to surprise us with a big bucket of KFC – our midnight treat.

I can so vividly remember the intense feeling of happiness I felt that night, enjoying a bucket of KFC with my grandparents at midnight, sitting around the Formica table, rehashing the scores of the last 5 round of poker and laughing at Grandma’s neurotic terror over losing Grandpa. 

When I think about today and my stress over picking the right stone for our new fireplace, having to replace a tire on my SUV, signing the kids up on time for the correct sports teams and activities,  it contrasts starkly with the easy happiness of those weekends at my grandparents house.

I hope, in the midst of our busy lives, I will make time to have moments like those with my own kids.  And I hope my kids will have weekends with their grandparents that leave them feeling loved and connected.  And I hope that one day someone loves me the way I did them; enough to have them crying on their way to work one day over the simple memory of an ugly Formica table.