Ms
Keogh, my more significant other, resigned her
position at Planned Parenthood due to the
unacceptable level of stress that has been
progressively worse over the past year. She blames
the present Republican administration. They have cut
funding to Planned Parenthood, which in turn makes it
harder for the uninsured to receive assistance. But
that isn't the subject of this essay. Meanwhile, Ms
Keogh still has her part-time job teaching the
gynecological examination to medical students and
midlevel practitioners. She also makes a little money
from the sale of her art. For the most part and for
the near future, we shall have to make do primarily
on my income. Not having money is onerous. But that
isn't the subject of my essay, either.
Not being able to afford to go out, we have
redirected our fun time together to the kitchen
table. It is a good table. When my parents first
moved from a larger, custom-made house in Broomall,
which my father lost through his financial
shenanigans, to this smaller Levittown house in 1961,
which has since become mine, my parents didn't have a
kitchen table. The one from Broomall was too big for
this smaller kitchen. They searched and found one
they liked, and then had a friend in the business
order it for them at cost. It is a round,
Formica-like table at which my parents ate thousands
of meals on the smooth, fake-grain surface. Now this
table serves Ms Keogh and me, but not for meals.
We derive a great deal of pleasure just sitting at
the kitchen table and playing games while we discuss
everything under the sun. We sit opposite each other
and bring in the tall chair Ms Keogh uses at her
drawing table to place between us. It is for
Jazzbender the cat. From this high perch, Jazzbender
can watch the game until it bores him, will usually
end up curled into a croissant and asleep. Still, he
always shows up, just wanting to be in our aura.
Ms Keogh and I play a fairly regular game of
Scrabble. I have just lost for the third night in a
row. It cost me thirty-nine cents, the difference
between my score and her score. When we play draw
poker, a nickel-and-dime game with a quarter ante, I
usually win. When we play five hundred rummy, a penny
a point, the game is fairly equal.
I used to be the better Scrabble player, but then I
was foolish enough to teach her all my strategies. Ms
Keogh used to endeavor to produce exotic words or to
use the most letters. I showed her the value of
knitting tight formations, placing a single letter to
form words in two directions. I revealed how
observing the eyes of your opponent you can tell the
area they are studying and intend to use. If you can
do nothing else, it is sometimes better to block. She
has adopted my lessons and has furthered her skills,
learning lots of obnoxious little words with peculiar
spellings that astonish me when I challenge her, yet
find them in the dictionary. Xu, xi, jo, vug, et
cetera.
We also play the rare game of chess, the only game we
play that doesn't involve money. Last year Ms Keogh
borrowed my Staunton chess pieces to make the subject
of a series of small paintings. She misplaced a rook.
She made it up to me by buying an impressive new set
of Staunton pieces by Drueke; the kings are four and
three-eighths inches tall, one and seven-eighths
inches wide at the base. They are beautifully grained
wood pieces and are very heavily weighted. They are
so large, they wouldn't fit on my chess board. For
that reason we drew a larger chessboard on our
kitchen table with permanent black markers.
So we play games at our kitchen table, but never eat
there. All our meals are taken out. The theory is,
eating out saves us time and labor. Now that there is
less money to spend, we eat at the cheaper places.
Sometimes it is just a matter of grabbing a sandwich
and eating in the car. When we do eat at home, we eat
sandwiches or fast foods that we've brought home, and
we eat in the guestroom lounging on the Recamier
while watching our only television, a nineteen inch
Panasonic.
Despite the lack of family meals (there are only the
two of us and a cat) the kitchen table still serves
as a bonding experience. If not playing games, I
might be writing letters while she is manufacturing
tiny watercolors to adorn cards for correspondence.
She regularly employs that table in some artistic
endeavor or for assembling frames. There is usually
debris to be shoved aside so that we can play cards.
What does it matter if we can't afford to go out to
the movies?
For reasons financial or medical, I might never see
the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, the Great
Pyramids, the Great Barrier Reef, nor the Acropolis,
Vatican City, and Machu Pichu. I might never ride in
a gondola along the canals of Venice, sit at a café
in Lisbon, or stroll the marble halls of the
Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. I doubt I will
ever climb to the Potala Palace in Lhasa at this late
stage of my life. What does it matter? I will never
have enough time with her at the kitchen table.
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