My table (the first one)

The dining room of my childhood , a large wooden table with bronze elements on the legs , set with the buffet. 60's, bourgeois house.

Dad's place in the center, mom on the left to be able to go back and forth to the kitchen, me across from her on his right. Every lunchtime food on the table, salad, main course, fruit. The vegetables uncut in a bowl , the salad must be cut at that moment it was said, and the dressing oil lemon oil salt and a teaspoon of mustard , what was it called you see? Savora yes savora had a red label. He would whack the ingredients with his fork, chop chop chop, into the plate and that's how the meal soundly began. Every lunchtime at 2.30.

Mealtime was sacred, not always pleasant, but sacred. If by chance the phone rang a black one we had at the entrance on a baize probably set with the dining room table, he would pick it up and before the other person could speak he would say curtly «we are eating call back later».

This rule was only broken when years later I left to study in England and we had a daily lunchtime telephone appointment. He would stand there by the phone waiting for the answering machine to ask him if he would accept the call from London as I was calling from a phone box and charging the call to him. As soon as he heard Hello Sir he would start a prolonged yes yes yes without listening to what the operator was saying. This call no matter what time it was , he was not eating he was picking up.

He bought the vegetables coming from the shop he had in the centre, so that they would be fresh, I remember waiting for him to turn the corner, he was walking down Herodotou Street with the bag in his hand. That image is still very clear in my eyes. The black leather mailbag in one hand with documents and notes - he had the habit that I inherited and I inherited pure to take notes on whatever papers, papers, newspapers, cigarette boxes he found in front of him - and the plastic bag with salads and fruit in the other.

At this table we ate as a family for eleven years, there was shouting, fighting, crying etched into its shiny wood, always something going wrong. Sometimes the food hadn't worked, sometimes she asked for something that annoyed him, sometimes he didn't want much of much however I think the aftertaste was not pleasant.

But he was also in his festive mood when he was dressed in the good tablecloth, the embroidered one, for birthdays and celebrations. Then we would lay it horizontally in front of the buffet and it would be filled with goodies for the feast. Homemade bobbies, salted and sweet soudakia, sweets ordered from Asimakopoulos or Flokas, and the photographer Mr. Zourelis from Solonos Street would come and take pictures of the table which had a wonderful bouquet of flowers in the middle of it, specially ordered by my mother, who had been taking the silver vessel to the florist's shop since the morning to make the arrangement. Lovely those gatherings for my birthday Flea month ,all dressed up in costume, but also the card game nights with their friends, every Wednesday afternoon when the rotundas were laid out for kum khan , three in number and all the lights were turned on in the living room and the dining room table was a buffet of tasty treats for the break time. I remember sleeping in my parents’ bed those nights because mine was adjacent to the living room. After the divorce he always ate alone in the same place and on the right he placed the canary cage , so they could eat together. Slowly he took out the bowl with the canary and that's how Ruby learned to get out of the cage and nibble his food freely. From then until his death every canary that passed through the house was trained to eat lunch at the table like gentlemen.

But the table wasn't just for food , that's where we sat to put the stamps in order , that's where we did our bills, that's where the two of us talked when we had to , that's where I took him a tape recorder for the first time and had him tell me his story and he laughed like a little kid when he heard his voice, that's where I watched him sit holding his head sad and alone. .

I traded the table for a suit and two sweaters when he died.