My Dining Room Table

"A perfect dinner for me is being with people I really want to be with. It starts and 

stops with ... my family." -Catherine Bach

Pop into my dining room on any given day, and you will likely see a few photos at the far end of the table. 

These are our people.

Our parents and grandparents, those who came before us and are now gone head of us, those who gave us life.

It's become a fun tradition for me to dig out a few photos of those special people and place them on the table during the months of their birthdays or wedding anniversaries, 

It's the next best thing to having them with us in person. 

This year, you'll also find a handful of flowers  - the birth flowers for the month. 

And always candles. Because I like to burn things. 

The large photo is my father-in-law, Charles Leroy Streicher, during his teenage years. Might be his senior picture, if that was a thing during the Depression. 

He was born January 4, 1916, son of a dairy farmer in northern Ohio. 

At a high school state track meet, he and his teammates ran a four-man relay with a record time that stood for decades at Elyria High School. That accomplishment was a matter of great pride to my soft-spoken father-in-law and I heard the story many times. When the record finally fell, the local paper printed a great story about the old-timers and my mother-in-law clipped the article and proudly shared it with us around their dinner table. 

A few years after high school, Chuck was out hunting with one of his buddies from the relay team, Bob Vanek, and accidentally shot him. Bob completely recovered from his wounds but my father-in-law never hunted again. 

* * * * *

The small Polaroid captures a family breakfast from my childhood with a rare image of my father at the far left. 

He was born January 2, 1926, son of a locomotive engineer who worked in the freight yards at the River Rouge plant in Detroit.. 

My parents bought my childhood home before I was born, when it was literally nothing more than a one-room fishing shack. Over the years, often with the sweat of their own brows, they turned it into a home. 

Though my mother preferred more traditional furniture and fixtures, my dad was a mid-century modern guy all the way. At his insistence, our home featured:

a soaring A-line roof, 

a turquoise front door, 

gleaming hardwood floors, 

clean-lined Danish furniture, 

and several on-trend hanging lamps. 

In this shot of our dining area -  a table complete with steel hairpin legs and orange Eames chairs - the fixture over the table looked to us kids like a flying saucer on an adjustable cord that could be pulled up or down, if you had the right touch. 

As much as my dad let me down in countless other ways, I always enjoyed his sense of style. 

I wish I could go back and spend more time with our people. I miss sharing meals with them.

But I am happy for their stories that I carry with me every day of my life.

And I'm happy to put their faces on my dining room table.