My oldest sister and godmother, Mary, rang me and she said:
"Haw, Harry - do you need a dining table?"
I'd recently moved back up to Scotland from Blighty, and my siblings were contributing time and effort to make me feel at home, and more importantly, welcome. It's really quite amazing just how far the wee things like that go when your hyper-sensitive like me - these randon acts of kindness made a world of difference in helping me feel welcome and furnished my new home with this an that; 'Bit ah tat really', I told myself, but tat that makes you feel at 'home' all the same, is priceless.
I thought for a moment of this auld table, and in my mind there were questions:
"... is it that one dining table they've had for years? ", and my mental meanderings continued thus...
"...is it the one we all cried around when we knew that our dignified wee mother had absorbed the bitters-sweet news that her cancer had metastasized into cerebral areas, making her care palliative only, and effectively terminal?"
It was bitterweet because leaving 'us ' - her babies, as she still thought of of us all ten, even then, was bitter, and 'sweet' because she'd get to see 'Her Harry' the only man she'd ever known and loved, my namesake and father, big shoes to fill, and whom she'd soon abide by on the other, - a thought that lit her whole countenance up like a Christmas tree. I was training in counselling psychology and I knew she was accelerating her demise with the amount she smoked: She admitted it too me as well, sat aside me on her bed. It was the closest she came to crying, and ashamed but honest in her admission. By that stage of our lives we told each other truths; it was a special time.
"I miss him!" was all she said, there was nothing else to be said.
So at this table, we'd talked about how our wee mother was dying; my sister Mary, herself suffering breast cancer, a radical mastectomy- and bearing the double trauma of her own terrifying ordeal in tandem with the pending loss of her own dear mammy. It was indeed that one round table, the one that had had all those 'Grace Before Meals' uttered around it in various states of bone-wearied hunger- over the years; hundred's and hundreds of them. Then there were the late night stories over ovaltines or if someone was luck, a dram.; my sisters, the lassies, and their sessions with tea, biscuits 'n' a blether; the raised voices about that ' Ould Bitch Thatcher?' She couldn't mean that table; The one that Thomas & Stephen sang around while Katie learned the piano? Where my niece Donna Marie bounced wee Louis in nappies, while Mary n Tam got used to being granfolk. The table where Tam got used to eating without a thumb when he lost it in an accident at work.
The one we had all those Heart To Hearts talks around, Our Mary and I, when I was learning to live without alcohol and other forms of self-hate-fuelled bondage.
This table was SCREAMING to be the Talisman for my first book; Alan McGee's Memoir. It was the perfect confidant and had seen enough of Scots life to be my extra companion to discuss things with.
That Table and I had matters of great importance to discuss, and that opinion was highly regarded even in my lean mind, but I'd have to tell Alan.
I'd recently started writing the synopsis for Alan McGee's Memoirs:
Beginnings can be difficult, but Alan & I were enthusiastic and the Table was 'chatty'!
I'd been discussing with myself - ways to decorate and furnish my apartment so that it would provide sources of inspiration. There were curiosities everywhere; Old sporrans; a peculiar crucifix', plants, posters, masks.. An Infant of Prague; a wee bit of ancient looking reddish wood in a matchbox that my Palestinian friend Arafat gave me, convincing me that it came from the very Cross upon which Christ hung; A full sized print of Rembrandt's Prodigal Son with the masculine and feminine hands...
Oh I scattered the place with my own post-modern detritus, reflecting my mild religiosity & neurosis of a middle aged, gluttoned-out Epicurean & incorrigible hedonist.
But that table was animated with the life and the LIVES of the family alive and dead, and it challenged me with care. It care-fronted, not confronted, my epicurean excesses and whispered secrets that I needed to 'fast' to write better. The whole collective history of my Godmother/sister and her man's family, and THEIR family entered through my pores, as if by osmosis - and into my psyche. Then slowly, one by one, as I came to know them, the members of the illustrious McGee family started to take their places; Gran Barr; Susan, Laura, John et al. All of a sudden, I NEEDED THE TABLE...
The Table is still animated with life, pregnant with meaning - it takes one on a journey, if you dare it - meandering with metaphor, vignette and Grampas peccadilloes - and out of its fount; pop plums of profundity!
While writing - The Table, Oor Mary & Tam's Table, The McGeee/Mulligan Table as its now known, -it talks to me. Its the filter...
And through The Table, the pages are being filtered and sprining to life...
In my family, things o'er the years become enchanted like that.
Like Oor Mary's Table.