If you could ever imagine a place and the people I will attempt to describe, then you will know the "laughing table," and you will be as fortunate as I am.
First, I will attempt to describe our family. The family matriarch is our 80+ year old widowed mother of 5, grandmother to 8, and great grandmother to 1. Mom recently told us that the current size of her family(including pets) is all she can handle at her age, and there should be no more; sorry to the young newlyweds, that means no kids for you until grandma kicks the bucket! Mom is a character that has certainly gotten riper with age; like stinky cheese. She's from a generation that was blitzed in London during war with Germany, came to America on her own following WWII, married a Navy man, and had 5 children, including me at the age of 42. She is very independent and both married, divorced, and re-married the same man in her life (our beloved dad). Much of the laughing we do around the "laughing table" is due to the fodder Mom provides. We're not laughing at her antics so much as we are laughing because we prefer to find the humor in the fact that Mom is now sometimes forgetful, hard of hearing, stubborn as a bull, uses her age as an excuse to speak her mind, and "doesn't care what we're all doing, just as long as we tell her first."
The rest of our clan is composed of myself, my 3 sisters and one brother, all of our respective spouses, exes and "friends," and all the kids, their "friends" and our littlest kid-of-a-kid that wants to know if "you got a duck in your pants?" Our family is as dysfunctional as the next with marriage, divorce, addiction, mood and anxiety disorders, various family turmoil, and, of course a love that holds us together. You name it, we've probably gone through it at some point. Yet through it all, we have often come through scathed and still able to smile.
One of our favorite places to come together is at Mom's because it's our family summer home in a gem of a location that I will not reveal yet. A dozen of us will literally sit around a kitchen table meant for 4 and talk, joke, tease, laugh and listen for hours on end, and if we're not eating all that time, we're planning what we
are going to eat (and drink) next. When the weather is warm or there's a fire pit ready to burn, we'll take our stories outside and circle around again.
It all sounds so mundane and normal. One day I had the gaul to chastise us all for being so lazy for "just sitting around laughing" that I was immediately put in my place and thus the "laughing table" was born. What could be better than to be in a place where we are all accepted for who we are, and we're expected to enjoy ourselves too? Even when our memories are not so fond, we often find cause to chuckle at the random absurdity of life's curve balls. To me this is what family is all about, and I hope you have as many fond memories of sitting around your dinner table as I do.