What We Bring to the Table

A bowl and a spoon can be enough to set a table. At another meal, there are glasses to find, chairs to draw up, a dish that must be passed from hand to hand. The table has room for both occasions.

Eating alone gives a meal its own proportions. There is the pleasure of choosing exactly what you want, of sitting by the window, of leaving a book open beside the plate. Something warm in a bowl deserves a comfortable place to eat it. You can stay after the food is finished.

With another person, the space between the plates becomes part of the meal. A question can take its time. Familiar company may need very little conversation; there is ease in eating together without having to fill each pause. Other evenings, something said over the first course is still being considered as the dishes are cleared.

Then there are tables where several conversations cross at once. Someone reaches for the bread. A story is interrupted, recovered, improved by an objection from the other end. The meal acquires a rhythm the host could never have arranged in advance.

These occasions ask different things of the room. A small light can gather one place into warmth. A larger table needs room for elbows, serving dishes, the person who arrives a little late. Formality has its pleasures, too: a cloth unfolded, a favorite plate brought out, the anticipation of sitting down.

Beneath the differences is a common hospitality. The room offers whoever is there a place to settle and something worth staying for. That welcome belongs to the person eating alone as fully as it belongs to a houseful of guests.

We bring appetite, of course. We also bring the day we have had, our need for quiet or company, something to tell or the wish to listen.

There is a place for all of it.