Morning Table
“Is there coffee?”
- Helen Francis Atwood
I ask each of my guests who are profiled on this site the same basic set of questions. The first question is designed to help put someone at ease and to learn about what makes them feel safe:
“Describe your favorite place (or places) in the world. It can be a place you have visited on vacation, somewhere in your home or neighborhood, or somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore; a place that feels both safe and peaceful. ”
This is a bit of a neurological trick, though I promise that there is nothing deceptive about it. Visualizing such a place can calm a person’s nervous system. It can quite literally put them at ease. I learned this question and the potential impact on the brain and body many years ago and have always found it fascinating. People often have more than one place that comes to mind. You may have dozens! My favorite place has been the same for many years and I offer it as an example to my subjects to help encourage their imagination: a wooden table, dappled with morning light, a cup of coffee nearby.
I don’t think of the ocean or the rolling hill country, both of which I love, nor mountains and rivers. When someone asked me this question for the first time, I was surprised to find that this very ordinary image was almost immediately called to mind. And I was certain about it. It would take me a few months to solve the riddle but once I did, I discovered something important about myself.
The time of day made some sense to me immediately. There is something about morning light, streaming through a leafy tree, diffuse and gentle, causing shadows to sway about the room. My table faces a wall of windows looking out to an aging Ash tree. The morning light is perfect. But this accidental perfection is not the reason my humble kitchen table is my favorite place in the world. It’s the memories. Memories rise like mists each morning, conjured by this simple visual combination of light, wood, and a cup of coffee. It comes even on a cloudy day. It comes when it rains. Even the shape of a white cup against the wood grain can be enough.
Memories are odd things. The science is amazing. The diseases that impact them - dementia and trauma - are horrifying. Healthy memories work in ways we often don’t expect, as the unseen mechanisms of our own brain sort through sprawling pieces of data, finally compiling it into what we perceive as a memory. For good and for ill, the process is remarkable.
Every morning when I see my kitchen table, I step into a feeling brought forward by strong memories. It’s the women in my family, sitting around five well-remembered wooden tables, nursing endless cups of coffee. When I see my table, I feel their love and hear their noisy chatter. I see their hands, some now gone, in relief against the table, grasping shapely white cups or balancing dainty saucer sets, as the near-constant sound of percolating coffee fills the room with the feeling of safety. Here, I am loved.
